Entering the Ring: "The Man Who Boxed Forever" (2001) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Man Who Boxed Forever" was written for Otto Penzler's Murder on the Ropes (2001), an anthology of original boxing mysteries, bringing together some heavyweights of the American crime-and detective fiction ("...provide knock-out combinations for your reading pleasure") – which wouldn't be complete without the champion of the short detective story. This short story is practically tailored for Hoch's oldest series-detective, Simon Ark.

Simon Ark is not only an elderly man, apparently somewhere in his sixties, but claims "to have been a Coptic priest in first-century Egypt" wandering "the earth ever since in search of evil, hoping for a confrontation someday with Satan himself." Until that day arrives, Ark's quest for evil uncovers all kind of dirty deeds forcing him to act as a detective. Even his longtime, nameless narrator "had to admit that he hadn't changed much in those forty years" he knew Ark.

"The Man Who Boxed Forever" finds the two at the Barbican Arena, in London, to watch the sold out heavyweight championship fight between Desmond "Dragon" Moore and Clayt Sprague. There they bump into a sports writer, Roger Russell, who asks if Ark is there to investigate the rumors about Dragon Moore ("the age thing, you know"). And asks them to come the next day to Leather's Gym to show them some clippings. But when they arrive at the gym, they find Russell's body lying in the middle of a boxing ring. Russell is bare to the waist, "boxing gloves were laced onto each of his hands" and punched into eternity with a studded leather hand covering ("a cestus from ancient Rome"). So a sparring match gone wrong or a clever murder? That's not all.

Before his murder, Russell was obsessing over Desmond "Dragon" Moore, "a Creole from New Orleans," who has no official records of where and when he was born, but bits and pieces of information, culled from various online archives, implies the boxer has been around for a very long time – covering a nearly 200 year period. There's an account of a wrestling match involving someone called the "Masked Dragon" ("...he also boxed without his mask as Desmond Moore" in 1939 and 1892 report on a bout in New Orleans between Dragon Moore and Reefer Foxx ("one of the first to be fought since bare-knuckle fights were outlawed"). It comes with a nineteenth century photograph depicting the spitting image of the modern-day Dragon Moore with the caption, "the Creole Dragon Moore, one of the first to fight with gloves under the new rules." Even stranger, the Dragon Moore in the old photograph and the current Dragon Moore have identical, dragon-shaped birthmarks on their left cheek. Dragon Moore brags to Ark he remembers the Battle of New Orleans and the Roman gladiators. So what's going on?

Like I said, "The Man Who Boxed Forever" is tailored for a detective like Simon Ark and loved the brief scene in which he's asked if he ever heard of someone living over a hundred and twenty years. So it's unfortunate the plot turned out to be a little uneven in its execution.

The apparent immortality of the man who boxed forever, seemingly backed up by historical records, is the most intriguing aspect of the story, but the answer is very prosaic. Fitting enough for both the story and modern, classically-styled detective stories in general (ROT13: hfvat gur vagrearg gb ohvyq hc gur zlgu bs na vzzbegny obkre naq pnfuvat va ba vg jura “Nzrevpna zngpuznxref jbhyq unir bssrerq ovt chefrf gb yher Qentba onpx npebff gur bprna sbe n svtug”). But when presented as a classically-styled, you expect/hope a little bit more ingenuity to be applied to such a fascinating premise. Fortunately, Hoch brought some of his customary ingenuity, craftsmanship and a practiced hand to the murder – reason why the murder was committed in that particular way is genuinely clever. It just didn't have the room to be truly effective as half the attention went to a centenarian prize fighter.

"The Man Who Boxed Forever" is still a good, fun effort from Hoch with one of his most creative premises, but the execution feels uneven and dropping one of the two plot-threads would probably have made for a better, tighter detective story. Like I said, it's still a fun, good enough short story that reminded me The Judges of Hades (1971) and The Quests of Simon Ark (1975) are still somewhere on the big pile.