Under Siege: "The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" (2000) by Edward D. Hoch

In 1995, Edward D. Hoch introduced a new character to his gallery of detectives, Alexander Swift, who's a civilian investigator and spy for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War – appearing in thirteen short stories between 1995 and 2007. Crippen & Landru collected the entire series under the title Constant Hearses and Other Revolutionary Stories (2022). I have not read anything from this series before, but one story was recommended, sometime, somewhere by someone, as an excellent historical impossible crime mystery. So decided to start as an appetizer to the series.

"The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" was first published in the December, 2000, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place in September, 1781, "nearly a year since Benedict Arnold's treasonous attempt to surrender West Point to the British." General Washington received secret intelligence Benedict Arnold, now a general in the British army, has returned and is planning expedition somewhere in Connecticut to divert a part of the American army away from Washington's campaign in Virginia. Washington dispatches Swift to find out Arnold's exact plans and alert the militia in Connecticut.

That brings Swift to the city of New London, on the Thames River, defended by Fort Trumbull on the west bank and Fort Griswold on the eastern side of the river. Fort Griswold, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Ledyard, is where Swift spends the night, but wakes up the next morning to the news "that British troops had landed under cover of darkness" and "were attacking on both sides of the harbor" – defenses were overwhelmed and eventually crumbled. Colonel Ledyard surrenders the fort and his sword to Lieutenant Colonel Potter, a Loyalist, who immediately plunged the sword into Ledyard's chest. Swift is together with the colonel's widow, two captains and two lieutenants the only survivors who now find themselves confined to guarded colonel's quarters.

Emily Ledyard demands her husband to be avenged, "one of you four, my husband's trusted officers, take revenge for his death by killing Colonel Potter by any means possible." She suggests the four draw straws, so none of them knows who really done it, which they do. Colonel Potter ends the day on the receiving end of a sword thrust, but the four officers were imprisoned together with Swift and Emily Ledyard when Potter was murdered. More pressingly than an apparent impossibility, Arnold telling he has to solve the murder because he intends to hang the murderer before departing. And if the murderer is not found before, they will all hang. So that's quite an incentive to play detective.

"The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" has a fantastic setup, plenty of historical drama and a few memorable scenes like the siege or the murder of Colonel Ledyard, but the plot is not one of Hoch's finest. I liked the idea of turning the locked-and guarded room inside to create an alibi that stands like a fortress, but found the explanation to be disappointingly unimaginative and second-rate. So, purely as a detective story or locked room mystery, "The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" came up short, but harmless as a fun, entertaining historical yarn.

Note for the curious: Mike Grost points out on his website that the Alexander Swift series can be read as an episodic novel as "the tales build on each other" to "form a united sequence, in some ways similar to a novel." So perhaps being chronologically challenged is the problem here.