LIBBY KNOWLES, ex-cop and professional bodyguard, debuted in “Five-Day Forecast,” a Hoch story first published in Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes, edited by Eleanor Sullivan (Davis, 1984). With her second case, published in EQMM late in 1984, she becomes the latest affirmative action recruit in Hoch’s small army of series characters.
MATTHEW PRIZE, criminology professor and ex-private eye, is the detective in a pair of paperback mystery puzzles inspired by Thomas Chastain’s best-selling Who Killed the Robins Family? (1983). Hoch created the plot outlines for these books, just as Fred Dannay did for the Ellery Queen novels, and the writing was done by others. Prize Meets Murder (Pocket Books, 1984) and This Prize Is Dangerous (Pocket Books, 1985) are published as by R. T. Edwards. (As this collection went to press, it became uncertain whether Pocket Books would actually publish This Prize Is Dangerous.)
Now that the troops have passed in review, it’s time we turned to the protagonist of this collection and the most durable Hoch sleuth of them all.
When Captain Leopold first appeared in print, no one noticed, for he began life as a subsidiary character in two Hoch short stories of 1957, and only five years later, in “Circus” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, January 1962), did he become a protagonist in his own right. The saga has since grown mightily, with a total of seventy-two Leopolds published as of the end of 1984, making it the most numerous of Hoch’s twenty-three series. (Rand and Nick Velvet with a few over fifty exploits apiece are the nearest runners-up.)
Why has Hoch written more about Leopold than about any other continuing character? I suspect because it’s the most flexible of his series, the least restrictive in terms of plot requirements: for a Leopold he needn’t come up with a new worthless object to be stolen or a new espionage-detection wrinkle but simply has to create a fresh detective plot, and these seem to come to him as naturally as breathing. But if anything sets off the Leopolds from Hoch’s other series, it’s that they frequently offer so much more than clever plots and gimmicks. In the best Leopold tales Hoch fuses the detective gamesmanship stuff of the Ellery Queen tradition with elements derived from Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, burying unexpected nuances of character and emotion and meaning beneath the surface of his deceptively simple style.
But beyond their individual strengths, when these stories are read in chronological order, as they are arranged in Leopold’s Way, they take on something of the nature of an episodic novel, with characters who appear, vanish and return, grow and suffer and die. Leopold is around forty years old when we first meet him in “Circus” and near sixty when we say goodbye to him in “The Most Dangerous Man Alive,” and the stories reflect not only his own development from the early 1960s through the end of the ’70s but also that of the large northeastern city in which he serves as the resident Maigret.
The city is not named in any story collected here, but in “The Killer and the Clown” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 14, 1981) it’s given the name of Monroe, which is the name of the county in which Hoch’s native Rochester is situated. As he visualizes the fictitious city, he says, it “bears some slight resemblance to Rochester turned upside-down, with the Sound substituting for Lake Ontario.”
The origins of Leopold himself are more complex. Hoch says he took the name “from Jules Leopold, a frequent contributor to a puzzle magazine I read as a youth.” In “Suddenly in September” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1983), a recent story not collected here, Leopold admits for the first time in the series that his first name is Jules—which of course is the first name of Simenon’s immortal Maigret. Although in one sense this is a coincidence—Hoch says that he read very little of Simenon till around 1964—it’s one of the most fitting coincidences in crime fiction. For the Simenonian feel in many of the best Leopold tales is palpable, and Leopold himself is a sort of Maigret who works by rational deduction rather than immersion in a milieu and intuition.
The main events of his life are described at various points in the saga and form a biography as complete as the sketches Simenon habitually prepared for the protagonists of his nonseries novels. Jules Leopold was born in Chicago in 1921. His parents died in an accident when he was eight, and he spent the next six years in the Midwest community of Riger Falls, being raised by relatives whom we meet in “Captain Leopold Goes Home” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1975). At age fourteen he came to Monroe, apparently to stay with other relatives, and graduated from George Washington High in 1939. Even then he was considered the class brain. He entered Columbia University, was awarded his degree during World War II and joined Army Intelligence, serving first in Washington and later in North Africa, where he interrogated Italian prisoners. After the war he opted for a career in police work and spent a short time with a force out west, then a stint in Monroe, then a period with the New York City Police Department. In the late 1950s he returned to head the city’s Homicide Squad. He had married several years earlier but the ten-year relationship shattered a few years after he accepted the Monroe position, and he never saw his wife again until her tragic reunion with him in “The Leopold Locked Room” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1971). After the divorce he lives an exceptionally lonely life, drowning his solitude in work. His one serious affair of the ’60s comes to an end when he has to arrest the woman for murder in “The Rusty Rose” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966.) Thereafter his only pleasures in life are the solitary satisfactions of smoking and reading. By the late ’60s he’s fighting to kick the tobacco habit, as were countless Americans who were frightened by the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, and apparently he licks it at last. But he remains as avid a reader as ever, referring at various times to Chesterton, Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway and Le Carré among others. In the tales of the ’70s he’s described as “middle-aged and stocky,” but gratifyingly enough, feminism and the sexual revolution enrich his emotional life as he encounters a number of younger professional women. With policewoman Connie Trent, who enters the saga in “Captain Leopold Gets Angry” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1973) and presently holds the rank of Detective Sergeant, he is clearly tempted to have more than a working relationship, but he resists for the same reason that he won’t bring his personal auto to be washed at the police garage, and forces himself to think of her only as the daughter he never had. His relationship with pathologist Dr. Lawn Gaylord, whom he first meets in “Captain Leopold Looks for the Cause” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1977), is less inhibited but leads nowhere. His luck improves with defense attorney Molly Calendar, whom he first encounters in “Captain Leopold Beats the Machine” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1983) and who becomes the second Mrs. Leopold at the close of “Finding Joe Finch” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1984). Whether this marriage will work out or run into snags like that of another divorced police captain with a beautiful defense attorney who are the Thursday evening favorites of millions of televiewers (including Ed and Pat Hoch), only time will tell.
In many respects the Leopold stories mirror the development of American social concerns over the past quarter century. There’s a clear line of evolution, for example, from the primitive brutalizing tactics of Mat Slater in the pre-Miranda days of “Circus” to the quiet professional interrogations of suspects in the later tales, and another evolution in Leopold’s attitude towards women from the early years when he says flat out that their function is to stay home and have babies to the affirmative action decade when he comes to accept the opposite sex not only in his personal life but in the police department. But not every detail in the lives of Leopold and the other continuing characters of the saga is worked out in advance. Indeed the Leopold stories are like virtually every other long-running series—including the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, and my own modest creations—in being strewn with inconsistencies that reflect the author’s forgetfulness or changes of mind or both. Some of
those in the Leopolds can readily be explained away. In the early “Death in the Harbor” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1962) the captain’s office is on the upper floor of a high-rise headquarters building, and in “Reunion” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1964) and all subsequent tales it’s located on the second floor rear, but this hardly counts as an inconsistency: what career bureaucrat hasn’t changed offices on occasion? Then there’s the fact that even though Leopold and his first wife are clearly together in “The Tattooed Priest” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, British edition, November 1962), he tells several people in later stories that they’d broken up before his move back to Monroe. Again, no huge problem. Many divorced men misremember or lie about the circumstances surrounding the collapse of their marriage, and Leopold in “Circus” and other early tales seems exceptionally sensitive to questions about his marital status and whether he has children. But what are we to make of the remarkable ocular transformations of Connie Trent, who enters the police department with brown eyes which turn green a few months later (in “Captain Leopold Plays a Hunch,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1973) and then go back again to brown? And how do we account for the miraculous move of the entire city of Monroe from upstate New York, where it’s firmly situated in “A Place for Bleeding” and “Reunion,” to Connecticut, where it has stayed since “Bag of Tricks” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1970)? Here’s a puzzle by which even Dr. Sam Hawthorne might be stumped!
But these glitches in the continuity are at best of minor importance. What makes the finest Leopold stories outstanding in the Hoch repertoire is their fusion of expert plotting and clueing with the human dimensions characteristic of Simenon and of Hoch’s favorite living novelist, Graham Greene. With the help of the checklist at the end of this book, which lists every Leopold story through the end of 1984 and provides data on its original publication and all U.S. re-printings, readers may explore the whole saga. We hope that Leopold’s Way will entice many to do just that.
Circus
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED, and once again the quiet residential street was filled with the laughter of children. Here and there a puddle still remained, but now the sun was out, and that was all that really mattered.
Leopold parked his car behind the other one and walked through the wet grass of the vacant lot to the place near the trees where a small group of men stood silently waiting.
“I’m Leopold, from Homicide. What’s the story?”
“A kid got killed, Captain.”
“A kid? How?”
“Strangled.”
“Lift the blanket and let’s have a look.”
He couldn’t have been more than ten, a good-looking boy with sandy hair and blue eyes. There was a blue rope-mark on his throat. Leopold sighed and looked away. Sometimes it still bothered him when he saw them like that. Even after six years on Homicide it still bothered him.
“Who is he?”
“We think his name’s Tommy Cranston. Lives in that brown house over there. Mat’s checking.”
“All right.” Leopold rubbed his eyes. “I’ll be over there, too. Call me when the doc comes.”
“Right, Captain.”
Leopold walked back through the wet grass and crossed the lot toward the brown house. There were many children on this street, he noticed. They were running and playing and having fun. It was a good street. Or at least it had been.
“Mister Cranston?”
“Yes…”
“I’m Captain Leopold.”
“Come…come in…We just heard…”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Yes…Of course…”
“Is Mrs. Cranston…?”
“She…It was a great shock to her. One of your men is with her in the living room…”
One of his men…Mat Slater, a big tough hard cop who’d seen the city at its worst. Leopold knew him, but didn’t like him. He was the type of cop you found in the tough mystery novels. Only once in a while you found him in real life, too.
“Hello, Leopold. I just told them about it.”
“Yeah.” To Slater he was always “Leopold,” never “Captain.”
Mrs. Cranston was crying in a big green chair. Right at that moment she looked very small and very helpless.
“My boy…My boy…He…he was on his way to the circus…”
Leopold felt suddenly cold and he wanted to be out of that big brown house and away from the crying woman in the green chair.
“Come on, Slater. We can talk to them later.”
“Right.”
They went back outside and crossed the lot to the trees once again, and Leopold cursed the wet grass that clung to his shoes.
Slater lit a cigarette. “Something like this always happens on a Saturday afternoon. We’ll probably be up all night chasing down leads.”
“Yeah.”
“The doc’s here.” The doc was the coroner’s assistant, a middle-aged man who’d met death many times while working for the city. Leopold had seen him like this a hundred times before, bending over a silent form in some dim alley or crowded street. This was what the doc lived for.
Leopold frowned at the wet grass and the thing under the blanket. “How long’s he been dead, Doc?”
“About an hour.”
“Before or after the rain?”
The doc looked puzzled at that one. Finally he answered. “Body and the ground under it are both wet, but the ground’s not as wet as the rest of the place. Guess that means he was killed just after the rain started, but it’s hard to tell for sure.”
“Yeah.” Leopold had a vision of the killer tightening his rope around Tommy’s throat and killing him as the rain began to beat down upon them.
Slater ground out his cigarette and lit another one. “And nobody saw him?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Come on, Slater. We’ll see you a little later, Doc.”
The lot was filled with people now, and they had to push their way through the crowd.
“You know, Leopold, we should sell tickets to this thing. We’d probably get a bigger crowd than the circus.”
“Shut up, Slater.”
“What?”
“Shut up. I’m tired of listening to you. We’ve got a job to do. Let’s get it done and clear out of here.”
“Sure, Leopold, sure.”
Leopold looked up and down the quiet street with its puddles of water reflecting the grey clouds above. Even with the crowd in the lot, the street still had the silence of death about it. He wondered if it was always like this.
“What did you find out about the parents?”
“Not much,” Slater mumbled. “Kid left just before the rain started. He was going over to the circus. They’d taken him the night before, but he wanted to go again. It’s just a few blocks away. He was cutting through the lot on his way there. In fact, his mother watched him out the window until he got around the side of the house.”
Leopold was sweating now. He almost wished the rain would start again. “Did she see anything?”
“No. Nothing.”
“They got any other kids?”
“No. He was the only one.”
Leopold swore again and thought about the woman in the green chair. Maybe it was better in a way that Tommy was the only one. Then at least she’d never have to go through it all again. There were so many ways that sons could die these days. In front of a speeding car, or on some distant, half-remembered battlefield. Or in a vacant lot in the rain.
“Take the houses on this side of the street, Slater. See if the people noticed anything.”
“Sure.”
Leopold left him and headed for the nearest house. He glanced back at the lot and saw that the trees where Tommy had died were out of view now. There were only the police, clearing the crowd away. The body would be gone now, but men would still be working over the spot. There was much to be done before nightfall.
Leopold began ringing doorbells
and talking to people, but the answer was always the same. They had seen nothing, or if they had it was only the usual mysterious stranger who could be found any day in any neighborhood.
The sun was disappearing behind a low cloud when Leopold met Slater again.
“Get anything?”
“Nothing, Leopold. How about you?”
“Nothing. Listen, take a run over to that circus and start checking. Find out who could have been away at the time of the killing.”
“You think it’s somebody from over there?”
“No, but it’s worth trying anyway. I’ll be at the Cranstons’ house.”
Slater muttered something and walked away toward his car. Leopold watched him for a moment and then walked slowly toward the big house.
Across the street the cars of police and newspaper reporters were still parked, and in the lot next to the house there was still activity. Now and then a flashbulb would light the dim twilight for a second, and then fade away. Reporters, getting plenty of pictures for Sunday’s edition.
“Captain…Captain Leopold! How about a statement?”
A young kid, probably just out of journalism school.
“No statement. We’re following a few leads…”
“Are you personally conducting the investigation?”
“I’m here. I’ve been here since two o’clock this afternoon. And maybe I’ll be here all night.”
The reporter made quick notes on a small pad.
“Do you have any children yourself, Captain?”
Leopold looked at the young face for a long while, and then he walked away without replying.
“Captain…Captain…”
But he kept walking. It was just a story to them. Just a shocking story of a kid’s murder. Just something to sell a few more Sunday papers.
And to Slater it was just a job, a job he was paid for, but one that interfered with his Saturday nights.
Leopold went up the steps and knocked on the door of the brown house. Mr. Cranston came to the door, looking pale and very tired. He led Leopold into the living room without a word.
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