Funeral in the Fog (2020) by Edward D. Hoch

Crippen & Landru announced Edward D. Hoch's first collection of Simon Ark short stories since The Quests of Simon Ark (1984) back in 2007, but it took thirteen years for Funeral in the Fog (2020) to finally materialize – gathering sixteen of "the strange mysteries of Simon Ark" originally published between 1964 and 2005. Simon Ark claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest who's doomed to wander the earth and exorcise evil wherever he goes. Ark believes his destiny, or salvation, is to some day do battle with nobody less than Satan himself. So he's naturally drawn to crimes of an ostensibly supernatural persuasion with more than one locked room murder and impossible crime coming his way. 

Just one more thing before diving into this collection, I'm going to skip over "Day of the Wizard" (1964) and "The Weapon Out of the Past" (1980). I want to save the former for my planned reread of Locked Room Puzzles (1986) and reviewed the latter in "Locked and Loaded, Part 2: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories." And with that out of the way, let's begin. 

"Funeral in the Fog" originally appeared in the 1973 Summer publication of Weird Tales and brings Simon Ark into contact with a man from upstate New York, Jason Bloomer, who "claims the Devil is threatening to kill him." Bloomer has even seen this devil, in human form, strangle a woman without touching her or leaving a mark on the body. This happened six years ago, in Vietnam, during the early days of the American troop buildup when Bloomer fled to Java to engage with Rolf Dagon and Li Chow in a treasure hunt for Japanese gold that was hidden at the end of World War II. Bloomer witnessed how Dagon watched Li Chow "as if some invisible hands were choking the life from her" and now Dagon is coming for Bloomer. A very unusually-structured impossible crime tale, like an open-air locked room mystery a la Glyn Carr, in which Ark continues to elaborate on the multiple plot-threads right up till the end. A great pick to headline this collection! 

"The Avenger from Outer Space" was first published in the October, 1979, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and has Simon Ark engaged by NASA when an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut, David Woodword and Valery Feokarov, were killed by lightening within the span of eight days – which had been predicted by "something of a minor prophet." Conrad Blaze warned NASA two weeks previously that all their astronauts were doomed to die at the hands of "an avenger out of space who would destroy them for having ventured too far from earth." You would think this otherworldly threat is aliens, but no, the space avenger is apparently Thor ("...the strongest of gods and men, hurling lightning bolts from the heavens at all who would invade his sacred territory"). Ulysses 31 two years before its time! However, the how behind these miraculous deaths is not what makes the story a memorable one, but the brilliant, space-age twist on the age-old motive that lies behind the elaborate scheme. Hoch can be a little uneven when you read him in bulk, but he rarely let's you forget why he was one of the masters of the traditional detective story during the second half of the 20th century! 

"The Sorceress of the Sea," originally published in the August, 1980, issue of EQMM, brings Simon Ark to Sarasota, Florida, to investigate a mysterious murder on the sea. Hans Belkor went out alone in his ketch late Saturday afternoon and disappeared until the Coast Guard spotted the ketch drifting several miles off shore. They discovered Belkor had been "strangled with a long tress of blonde hair that had been twisted into a garrote" and strange entries in the ship's logbook. Belkor wrote how he witnessed the sea glow, bubble and steam before "a beautiful woman with long blonde hair came to the surface" named Doris. He believed her to be some kind of sorceress. While the solution to the murder is average at best, I liked the imagery and explanation to the appearance of the titular sea-witch. 

"The House of a Hundred Birds" was first published in the February, 1982, issue of EQMM and, regrettably, one of the weakest stories collected here. Simon Ark travels to London to help a friend, Chauncey Rideout, who has a travel agency and has two elderly spinster sisters as regular clients, Anna and Gertrude Stigner – living together in a big old family house in the north of London. Four days previously, Gertrude had been killed in the kitchen by a burglar. Anna fears the murderer might actually be her lodger. So not a typical case for someone who hunts the devil and investigates apparently supernatural crimes, but what attracted him to the case is that sisters kept more than a hundred birds in their home. Everything from canaries and doves to lovebirds. Hoch obviously wrote the story around a historical curiosity he heard about and tried to find a contemporary application for it, which made the solution feel a little contrived. 

A note for the curious: Simon Ark's answer to the bird question is that (ROT13) "vg vf oryvrirq va pregnva cnegf bs gur jbeyq gung pntrq oveqf xrrc tubfgf naq rivy fcvevgf njnl sebz n ubhfr gung znl or unhagrq." I've never heard of that one before and a quick internet search yielded no results. So is that actually believed in certain parts of the world or did Hoch made that detail up for storytelling purposes? 

"Prisoner of Zerfall" originally appeared in the November, 1985, issue of Espionage and brings Simon Ark to Berlin where the curtain is about to fall on one of the last chapters of the Second World War. A convicted Nazi war criminal, Erwin Witterberg, has been imprisoned at Zerfall Castle, West Berlin, since Nuremberg trials nearly forty years ago. The now 76-year-old Witterberg is the last surviving prisoner guarded by "a joint force of American, British, French and Russian military police" and his "imprisonment has become something of a political symbol." Witterberg has inexplicably vanished from the exercise yard. One moment he was seen circling the yard and the next he had disappeared without a trace!

So this story belongs to that rare subcategory of impossible crime stories dealing with prisoners who mysteriously disappear from tightly locked and closely-guarded prisons or holding cells. Some examples include Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905), Maurice Leblanc's "L'évasion d'Arsène Lupin" ("The Escape of Arsène Lupin," 1906), Curtiss T. Gardner's "Sorcery in the Death House" (1943), James Holding's "The Philippine Key Mystery" (1968) and Bill Pronzini's "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle" (1976). Sadly, Hoch's method to make the prisoner disappear is not nearly as good as the tricks in those stories or as inspired as the clever motive behind the vanishing act. So this one works better as a Cold War spy caper than an impossible crime story. However, Simon Ark tells a legend from 1815 of a prisoner, named Diderici, who had been held captive at a Prussian prison, at Weichselmunde, where he "vanished while walking in chains in a walled exercise yard" and “prisoners walking behind him say he simply faded from sight" – chains falling to the ground and "nothing more was ever seen of him.” Ark gives a possible solution to this historical myth that would not have been out-of-place on the pages of a Seishi Yokomizo or Soji Shimada novel. I don't understand why Hoch used it as an anecdotal clue instead of writing a full-fledged short story around the idea, because it would have added another locked room classic to his body of work. 

"The S.S.S." was originally published in the November, 1986, issue of Mystery Scene and gives a slightly bigger role to Simon Ark's nameless narrator. This nameless narrator is a senior editor of the publishing company, Neptune Books, who published Ark's book on Satanism and the now company has drawn the ire of the Society for the Suppression of Satan. The S.S.S. claim the company's colophon, or emblem, is "the devil because he's holding a pitchfork" rather than Neptune wielding his trident. So they threaten to organize a nationwide boycott unless they change it, but a chat with Simon Ark reveals the S.S.S. would consider a financial contribution to their cause "overwhelming proof" of their innocence and would force them to reconsider their position. So, apparently, a run-of-the-mill extortion plot, but soon complications arise that requires some actual detective work. A decent enough detective story and nothing more. I think this story demonstrates that the series only works when Simon Ark has bizarre, otherworldly or downright impossible puzzles to pick apart. Anything less just makes the story feel like minor stuff. For example, one of the later stories in this collection can be described as minor stuff, but the strange, unnerving nature of the problem makes it feel a lot more substantial than it really is. More on that one in a minute. 

"The Way Up to Hades" was first published in the January, 1988, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and delivers the bizarre, otherworldly and downright impossible that makes the series work. Simon Ark drags his nameless narrator to rock concert at Madison Square Garden in New York where a rockstar, Rager, summons the devil on stage and ends his shows by crying out, "Satan, take me! If there is a Lord of the Underworld, let me be with you this day in Hades" – proceeding to vanish in "a burst of flames and smoke." The narrator tries to explain to Ark it's all part of the act, but Ark uses the editor to get backstage under the guise of potential book deal. But what they eventually get is a front row seat to an impossible disappearance. Rager is seen "to enter a glass elevator which takes him up sixty floors and makes no stops on the way," he's observed standing inside the elevator between floors, but "when it reaches its destination he has vanished." Just "one of his damned fireballs" that burned a hole in the carpet.

The story mentions two locked room mysteries involving elevators, James Yaffe's "Department of Impossible Crimes" (1943) and John Rhode and Carter Dickson's Fatal Descent (1939), but “The Way Up to Hades” clearly belongs to the type of locked room stories based around stage magic and misdirection that Clayton Rawson specialized in. The solution even shares Rawson's weakness with bits and pieces that "stretch believability" a little, but, on a whole, not a bad story at all with a new wrinkle on the impossible crime in a sealed and moving elevator (a disappearance rather than a murder). I'm actually surprised it never turned up in any of the locked room-themed anthologies from the past forty years. 

"The Virgins of Valentine" is Hoch's original contribution to 14 Vicious Valentines (1988), an anthology of short horror stories, but Hoch delivered a simple and straightforward detective story. Simon Ark travels to the town of Valentine, "nestled in the hills of northern Pennsylvania not far from the New York State line," where an old St. Valentine's Day custom has been revived. On St. Valentine's Eve, the local girls go to the graveyard at midnight, sing a prescribed chant and run around the church twelve times. This should conjure up the appearance of their future spouses. So, naturally, the local boys ensure they're around "to put in an appearance at the magical moment." The cemetery is quite crowded on Friday, April 13th, which is used as a cover to kill a local and colorful character, named Oliver Martin, who dresses like the Devil. Despite all the story dressing, old customs and allusions to the devil, the story is a simple, clearly reasoned whodunit without any complications like unbreakable alibis, dying messages or invisible killers. Just a whodunit. Not a bad one, either, but one that feels out of place in a horror anthology and the Simon Ark series. I think the story would have better suited one of Hoch's other series-characters like Susan Holt. 

"The Stalker of Souls" is another original contribution to an anthology, Dark Harvest (1989), which this time is entirely in line with the theme of that collection. A group of Swedish students made a pact with the devil in early 1970s by exchanging their souls for success in their chosen field. They all achieved a great deal of success, while still under forty, but, decades later, "the devil was starting to collect." One of them was decapitated in a motorcycle accident and, a year later, Arno Blackmoor begins to hear the sounds of "hoofbeats on the cobblestones" following him home late at night – when he looks behind him "there is no one in sight." Simon Ark goes to Stockholm after learning Blackmoor had been murdered and decapitated in the street without a trace of his murderer. What he discovers is not a cloven-hoofed demon, but a very human kind of evil "doing the devil's work."

Sound of ghostly footsteps is a fascinating variation on the no-footprints scenario, but the number of possible solutions appears to be severely limited and one-note. Just compare “The Stalker of Souls” to Anthony Wynne's "Footsteps" (1926). I think only C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935), collected in The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003), managed to do something different with the idea. So a pretty average entry in the series. 

"The Society of the Scar" originally appeared in Predators (1993), another anthology, in which the nameless narrator goes to Istanbul, Turkey, to acquire the rights to three novels by Turkish writer, Mustafa Byzas. Simon Ark had lived in the city in the 1920s and comes along to renew his acquaintance with the place, but his attention is drawn to a fascinating little problem by an old friend, Professor Metzger. A retired art professor and acting curator of a museum where eleven paintings have been slashed within three months' time. The work of a madman who seems to be invisible to the guards. A young man with a limp passes a note to Ark, "learn about the Society of the Scar, Grand Hamam, four o'clock," which is a Turkish bathhouse. But when they arrive, the man they were supposed to meet had his throat slashed.

On the surface, "The Society of the Scar" is a competently plotted detective story expertly employing the backdrop and particularly the murder in the bathhouse is very well done. A very well reasoned solution why that person stood out as suspicious and why only that person could have done it. However, the slashed paintings, while perfectly motivated, makes no sense. How did the slasher hope to (ROT13) ergevrir gur cncre uvqqra orgjrra gur pnainf jura fur bayl unq n fcyvg frpbaq gb qb gur fynfuvat. This is not addressed in the story. 

A note for the curious: this story strongly suggests Ark's claim to immortality is not out of the realm of possibility. The narrator asks Metzger what Ark was like in the 1920s and he answers, "much as he is today" and that "he has changed very little." To which the narrator surprisingly exclaims, "but that was over sixty years ago!"

"No Blood for a Vampire" first appeared in the anthology Vampire Detectives (1995) and brings Simon Ark to the island of Madagascar on the behest of one Mano Ratki. There's a serial killer on the loose and Ratki believes the murders have a connection to vampirism, but the authorities scoff at the very idea as the victims were strangled without spilling a single drop of blood. Ratki has a good reason to believe the murderer is a vampire, because he recognized a person who had been forced to leave another country on charges of vampirism. Ark and his narrator arrive on the island during the season of famadihana (turning of the bones) when the locals "bring the dead from their tombs to be wrapped in new shrouds." This custom reveals a fresh victim of the serial killer. I honestly didn't expect the story to be anything more than a modern serial killer story, which is an accurate description, but the conclusion has all the ingenuity of a Golden Age-style detective story. A good and solid late entry in the Simon Ark series. 

"The Graveyard Ghoul" was originally published in the anthology Night Screams (1996) and is the story is referred to when discussing "The S.S.S." George Mitchner has an estate with a family cemetery on it, which has had its graves desecrated and vandalized as coffins were dug up, opened and the family crypt was entered – covered in spray-painted pentagrams. The bodies were neither not taken or robbed "as if the vandal simply wanted to view the remains." Mitchner believes it was his son, Andrew, who opened the graves. Even the grave of his dear mother. Hoch wove a historical plot-thread through the story concerning why the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson opened the coffin of his young wife thirteen months after she passed away. Plot-wise, this is a very minor story centering on the interpretation of behavior and actions without a sane reason or motivation behind it, but the somber ghoulishness of it all makes the story feel so much than it actually is. 

"Master of Miracles," originally printed in the May, 1999, issue of EQMM, on the other hand is a throwback to the pulps of the early decades of the previous century. Simon Ark learns that a former stage magician, Thaddeus Lusk, has started a new religious cult in California, the Luskites. Lusk performs "magic tricks and miracle cures" by throwing out fireballs and then commanding rain to fall from the cloudless sky to douse the fires. He also predicts that a member of his congregation, Kelly Block, who broke the rules "will be gone by noon tomorrow." On the following day, Kelly is seen driving her car into a car wash and never exited on the other side. She and the car had both vanished like a burst soap bubble. Hoch obviously got the idea for the trick from a '90s toy (or toy commercial) and not sure how well the trick would work, but it certainly counts as a new take on the impossible disappearance. While the explanations to the rain commands and miraculous disappearance can only be described as pulp, Hoch employed them masterfully to stage a murder as theatrical as it's gruesome. You can even call it nightmare fuel. 

A note for the curious: this story gives the reader another indication Ark might actually be a lot older than should be humanly possible ("but hadn't he seemed a vigorous man in his seventies when we first met, decades ago?"). 

"The Gravesend Trumpet" was originally published in the September, 2005, issue of EQMM and gives the impression Hoch had been watching Jonathan Creek at the time, because the story could easily have been an episode for that series. Simon Ark returns to England to visit the town of Gravesend, where Pocahontas is buried, to visit the Hamstitch Museum. Joshua Hamstitch was an archaeologist in the early 1920s who found the trumpet of the Last Judgment near the town of Luxor on the Nile. The legend tells that the trumpet can summon the dead, but when Hamstitch 46-year-old Hamstitch blew on the trumpet he died on the spot of old age. During his visit to the museum, their guide, Naomi Swift, tells she has been tempted to blow it "just to prove how harmless it is." During a second visit she blows the trumpet with her husband, Ark and his narrator standing outside the door. When they go inside they find Noami is not only dead, but the body has aged into an old woman in her seventies. Just like with even the better Jonathan Creek episodes, you have to suspend disbelieve a little in order to swallow the plot. Not necessarily the trick itself, which is relatively simple (in theory), but other elements require some extra chewing. But a fun little story to close out this collection. 

Edward D. Hoch is and likely always will have a presence in detective-themed anthologies who can be relied upon to deliver one of the better stories of an anthology, but short story collections devoted exclusively to his own work often shows he could be very uneven – both as a writer and plotter. Funeral in the Fog is no exception to that rule. On a whole, a good and solid collection with one of Hoch's oldest and most fascinating series-detectives, but only half a dozen stories truly lived up to Hoch's fabled reputation as the Giant of Short Stories.