Deathwatch: "The Oblong Room" (1967) by Edward D. Hoch

Earlier this month, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's short story collection The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023), gathering fifteen stories in the Captain Leopold series from the 1981-2000 period, which comes with a detailed introduction and series retrospective – written by the celebrated French anthologist, Roland Lacourbe. The introduction directed my attention to a particular short story in the series.

"The Oblong Room," originally published in the July, 1967, issue of The Saint Magazine, is together with "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) the "most frequently republished Hoch stories," but, somehow, always confused "The Oblong Room" with "The Problem of the Octagon Room" (1981). So was a little surprise to read Lacourbe describing "The Oblong Room" focusing "less on who killed the victim than why" and "the motive, once discovered, will be one of the strangest in detective fiction." That doesn't sound like a locked room mystery at all! Sure enough, it turns out to be the exact opposite of a locked room mystery.

Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher have an apparently open-and-shut case on their hands when they're called to the scene of a murder at the men's dorm of the local university. Ralph Rollings, a sophomore, is found stabbed to death in his dorm room and the obvious suspect is his roommate, Tom McBern, who refuses to talk and demands a lawyer – while an obvious motive begins to emerge ("they probably had the same girl or something"). There are, however, some baffling details complicating, what should have been, an open-and-shut case. When the bloody scene was discovered, Ralph had been dead for the better part of a day and the only thing Tom is prepared to admit is staying with the body in the locked dorm room for the past twenty-two hours. Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher also have to take the drugs found in their room into consideration and the testimonies from other students about their strange relationship and the sway Ralph held over people ("...a power you wouldn’t believe any twenty-year-old capable of").

So the murder is not about whodunit and how the murder was pulled off, but what happened in that dorm room and why. A what-and-why-dun-it. Hoch obviously used the Captain Leopold series to experiment as "The Oblong Room" would not have worked as well in the Simon Ark or Dr. Sam Hawthorne series. Hoch's experiment here was not without consequences.

"The Oblong Room" was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine before The Saint Magazine bought and published it. Apparently, the solution has certain elements that "scared off some editors" at the time, but "The Oblong Room" in the end won Hoch an Edgar Award. Deservedly so? Yes... and no.

I think "The Oblong Room" is a good crime story, certainly for the time, but not one of Hoch's best short stories for two reasons. Firstly, the story and those controversial elements feel like a product of its time and, as far as sordid crimes go, relatively tame by today's standards – both real and fictitious. Secondly, the story needed to be longer for the ending to be truly effective. Captain Leopold noted himself that the problem with this case is that didn't get to meet the two principle players until the damage was already done. Well, that can in this case just as well be applied to the story and reader. If you're going to write a what-and-why-dun-it, you need to do more character work than was done here. Other than that another competent piece of work from Hoch.

After this short story and the previous short story collection, it's time for something slightly more traditionally plotted. Stay tuned!