The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) by Edward D. Hoch

Decades before Crippen & Landru, Edward D. Hoch had about half a dozen collections of his voluminous detective fiction published, throughout the 1970s and '80s, covering only three of Hoch's lead detectives – namely Simon Ark, Jeffery Rand and Nick Velvet. Simon Ark was the first to get a solo collection with City of Brass (1971), while Rand and Velvet had to share the spotlight in The Spy and the Thief (1971). Velvet would get his own collection years later (The Thefts of Nick Velvet, 1978), but Rand had to wait nearly two decades for The Spy Who Read Latin (1990). Who didn't have to wait years, or decades, to get an additional collection was Ark.

The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) was published practically alongside City of Brass. A short, snappish collection of five Simon Ark short stories from the 1950s and comes with an introduction from the editor of The Locked Room Reader (1968), Hans Stefan Santesson. So these aren't only Hoch's earliest short stories, but also among the earliest stories from his first detective series. Some of these early stories provide a better, more interesting perspective on Ark's character than the later stories that I'm familiar with.

Simon Ark, an elderly, normal looking man, claims to be over a thousand years old Coptic priest ("would you believe it if I told you I walked the sands of Africa with Augustine...") condemned to wander the Earth seeking out and exorcising evil. And, one day, do battle with the Prince of Darkness himself. One of the stories from this collection gives a possible origin, "a strange Coptic priest in the first century after Christ," who wrote "a gospel glorifying the Lord" that was denounced a fraud and turned him into a man who could be sent neither to Heaven nor Hell – doomed to wander forever ("...until such time as God would decide his fate"). So, unless Ark is supposed to be stark raving mad, this series can filed under hybrid mysteries as having an immortal detective certainly makes it qualify as one. Anyway, this series takes place during the second-half of the previous century and combating evil in this world means taking on the role of unofficial investigator. However, Ark is an investigator with a classical bend and the evils he exorcises are the type of bizarre murders and impossible crimes that would have been more at home during the first-half of that century.

"Village of the Dead," originally appeared in the December, 1955, publication of Famous Detective Stories, introduces Simon Ark and his nameless narrator, but the ending suggests Hoch probably didn't intend it to be the first in a series. Nor it to be proper detective story. This first brings the narrator, a magazine writer, to the tiny, isolated mining village of Gidaz where the population was reduced from seventy-three to zero overnight in a mass suicide when every men, women and child flung themselves off a hundred foot cliff. Simon Ark meets the narrator at the edge of the cliff as they look down at the bodies on the rocks below. What attracted Ark to the scene is a strange man, Axidus, who appeared as a religious figure in Gidaz two years previously ("I knew him long ago, in North Africa, as St. Augustine did..."). Axidus wielded a great influence over the isolated people of the village, but how could he have had a hand in the mass suicide? And why? Is this Axidus the same person Axidus from history or perhaps an even greater evil? It's not a spoiler to say the answers to all these questions reveal a far lesser evil than the devil's devilry. More like a dark, grim version of Scooby Doo leaving some lingering questions unanswered (like how the culprit "had ever heard the odd story of Axidus in the first place"). The narrator's final lines about Ark, "never saw him again after that night, but I have the feeling that he’s still around somewhere," shows this was probably meant to be a one-off. Just note that the last Simon Ark story was published in 2008.

So, on a whole, a somewhat unusual story, but an interesting start and introduction to Hoch's first series. Yes, it's one of those weird coincidences I read "Village of the Dead" right after Motohiro Katou's "In the Year of Quantum Mechanics" from Q.E.D. iff vol. 1.

"The Hour of None," originally published in Fall 1957 issue of Double-Action Detective & Mystery Stories, brings Ark and his narrator to the monastery of Saint John of the Cross in West Virginia. Ark received a letter from an old acquaintance, Brother Ling, who wrote to him "that your old enemy Satan is walking among us, in the mind of one of my friends" and that he's "possibly in danger" – a fear not unjustified. Brother Ling is pushed from a church tower before Ark got to speak to him. So now they have to find his killer with three principle suspects, Father Michael, Father Joseph and Father Mark, who were brought back to the United States by Brother Ling after being held prisoners in China for years. So an intriguing premise and, when it comes to form, it feels more like a Simon Ark story than the previous one. A great backdrop and cast of characters, but found the plot and especially the solution lacking. Things gets better in the last three stories!

"The Witch is Dead," first published in the April, 1956, issue of Famous Detective Stories, takes place at Hudsonville College for Women in Westchester County during the second decade of the Atomic Age. Not a place for old world witchcraft and magic, but Mother Fortune was still "peering into a mammoth crystal ball and telling you just what you wanted to hear about yourself." Recently, Mother Fortune went medieval by placing a curse on the students ("...your school will be a campus of the dead") over an old injustice from decades ago. And not without effect. A mysterious, unidentifiable illness is hospitalizing one student, after another, which naturally lured Ark to the campus. This case is complicated when Mother Fortune "died as all good witches must" in a burst of flames while alone inside her locked trailer.

Now this is far from Hoch's best detective story or locked room mystery, however, it's the first genuine detective story from this collection with a glimpse of the emerging short story giant. Hoch casually dropped one of those brazen, tell-tale clues identifying both murderer and method.

"Sword for a Sinner," originally published in the October, 1959, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, is unquestionably the best story from this collection. This time, Ark travels to the tiny village of Santa Marta, somewhere on the state line between Colorado and New Mexico, where Father Hadden asked him for help on a personal matter – believing he can communicate with the dead. Before they can even get down to talk, Father Hadden is informed a murder has been committed at the morada of Sangre de Cristo in the mountains. The village has seen the revival of the Penitentes, or Brotherhood of Penitentes, who perform self-torture as an act of devotion ("...rites of self-scourging and crucifixion..."). A practice that was banned by the church, but the society with its various chapters continued to exist and practice. So when they go to the morada, they find one of the most bizarre murder scenes Hoch has ever created. A dark, dimly cellar room full of life-size crucifixes with living figures tied to them, "horribly fantastically alive," wearing nothing more than a white loin cloth and a black hood. One of these crucified, hooded men was run through with a Spanish sword! The victim, Glen Summer, runs the local bar, Oasis, which Father Hadden described as "a den of sin." So plenty of potential suspects and motives to go around, but the key to solving the case is figuring out how the murderer was able to stab the correct victim under those circumstances. Ark's answer to this question is beautifully simplistic and logically. Something that makes you want to kick yourself, if you missed it. Those few years of experience were already paying off by '59.

Finally, "The Judges of Hades," originally appearing in the February, 1957, issue of Crack Detective & Mystery Stories, which brings this collection full circle. Sort of. The nameless narrator receives a devastating telegram, "YOUR SISTER AND FATHER KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT," which brings him back home to Maple Shades, Indiana. A town sometimes known through a never-ending prank as Hades (“...since the boys are always painting over the sign”). Things get worse when he arrives as the police believes it was a murder-suicide by head-on collision, but who killed whom? The motive appears to stem from a family row when the narrator's father, a judge, ruled against his own son-in-law in a zoning battle. So he asks Ark to look into the case as a personal favor, but Ark becomes interested when learning the victim was known as one of the Judges of Hades. While not terribly complicated or especially challenging, "The Judges of Hades" is a decent enough detective story with perhaps the best part being how it succeeded in revealing absolutely nothing about the narrator himself. Well done, Hoch!

So how to rate The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories? There are only a handful of short stories here and only "Sword for a Sinner" cut it as a classic Hoch performance, which is normally a poor score for a short story collection – even for a short collection of five stories. However, I appreciated how Santesson decided to arrange and present the stories. Santesson didn't arrange the stories in order of publication, but placed them in such a way there's a pleasing uptick in quality with each passing story from the first to fourth story. And the last story simply compliments the first. That makes The Judges of Hades a great introduction to the character of Simon Ark. It also gives a fascinating glimpse of how Hoch developed as a plotter during his first years as a professional writer. A strong recommendation for long-time fans of Hoch and Ark, but, if you're new to Hoch or Ark, I recommend trying one of the recent Crippen & Landru collections. I recommend Funeral in the Fog (2020) or The Killer Everyone Knew (2023).

Bad Weather: "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Rainy-Day Bandit," originally published in the May, 1970, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins three months into the crime spree of a modern-day highwayman, the Rainy-Day Bandit – who comes and goes with the rain. A bandit with a cloth mask and a shiny, nickel-plated revolver always striking in the daytime when its raining heavily.

This crime spree started simple enough with the stickup of a parking meter collector during a January rainstorm, but the Rainy-Day Bandit developed into a John Dillinger-type robber for his next few capers. Holding up a gas station, an insurance office, a branch of a big bank and recently "cleaned out six cash registers in a supermarket while fifty people watched" ("the guy's got guts..."). When a rich gambler was robbed of his deposit en route the bank, the papers begin to "treat him like a modern Robin Hood." Captain Leopold, head of the Violent Crimes Squad, tells Sergeant Fletcher "some day an eager citizen's going to jump him, and then we'll either have a captured bandit or a dead hero."

When a body is found in an alley with a gunshot wound, it appears the Rainy-Day Bandit claimed his first victim. The body is that of James Mercer, an insurance agent, who was making collections in the neighborhood. And, of course, the money is gone. Tommy Gibson, of Robbery, believes the murder is a Rainy-Day Bandit caper gone wrong, but Captain Leopold leaves all his options open. Leopold and Fletcher go down the list of collection stops. However, the Rainy-Day Bandit himself eventually turns up in their murder investigation adding an unexpected complication to the case. A complication hitting a little too close to home for Leopold.

"The Rainy-Day Bandit" is a showpiece of Hoch's ability at constructing short story plots with two different, but linked, plot-threads neatly tied up in a brief, fairly clued short story – packaged as a police procedural. I figured out the solution to both problems, but can only lay claim to a scrap of cleverness for identifying the Rainy-Day Bandit. I dumbly stumbled across the murderer by accident. You see, the name of one of the characters rang a bell in the dusty part of my brain storing obscure, mostly useless and arcane trivia as scraps of a phrase started floating to the surface. So looked it up and what I was trying to remember is the grim, now obsolete phrase (ROT13) "gnxr n evqr gb glohea." Only vaguagly similar to the name of that character, but that character turned out to be murderer. Hoch was not trying to be funny on the sly, but it would have been a funny clue disguised as an Easter egg had (SPOILER/ROT13) gur anzr bs gur zheqrere orra glohea vafgrnq bs glqvatf.

So, all in all, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" is another solid and competent showing from Hoch as Captain Leopold's slowly starting to become a personal favorite among Hoch's gallery of series-detectives. Leopold is probably not going to surpass Dr. Hawthorne and Ben Snow, but Simon Ark and Nick Velvet should be worried. You can expect more Hoch and Captain Leopold in the future. I'm toying with the idea to single review the short stories from Leopold's Way (1985) and compile those reviews in a single post/review of Leopold's Way. But we'll see.

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.

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024) by Edward D. Hoch

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024), introduced by Tom Mead, is the latest collection of Edward D. Hoch short stories from Crippen & Landru and covers two short, but complete, series with the first being "an incredibly audacious experiment in storytelling" – a short novel made up of short stories. Six short stories, "The Pawn," "The Rook," "The Knight," "The Bishop," "The Queen" and "The King," originally serialized in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from April to September 1971 under the name "Mr. X." The Will o' the Wisp Mystery was reprinted in complete form a decade later in the anthology Ellery Queen's Maze of Mysteries (1982), before descending into obscurity. A shame as it's one of Hoch's more inventive pieces of detective fiction. Not only for its storytelling structure!

The one-shot detective of this unusual mystery is David Piper, the Manhunter, who works for the fictitious, ambiguously-named and underfunded Department of Apprehension. Piper's department assists other law enforcement agencies in "the capture of escaped convicts, the location of parole violators" and "even on occasion the return of runaway teenagers to their parents."

So when a prison bus transferring six criminals to jail gets hijacked, the Manhunter has to track down and apprehend the escaped prisoners. Busting a prison bus that leaves two guards dead, one injured and half a dozen criminals being pursued by man nicknamed "The Manhunter" sounds hardboiled, but there's a traditionally, fairly-clued puzzle plot – cleverly hidden underneath its timely trappings. Over the course of half a dozen stories, Piper attempts to find a connection between Nick Bruno ("underworld king"), Hugh Courtney ("impostor and murderer"), Kate Gallery ("murderess"), Charlie Hall ("swindler and card cheat"), Jack Larner ("bank robber and car thief") and Joe Reilly ("forger"). And, again, why they were busted out considering the people who organized the prison van ambush paid big money ("...my theory that they're together on some sort of big caper"). Each of the six stories has a self-contained piece of the bigger picture, tied to each of the six escapees, but every story ends on a cliffhanger. And, of course, they start bleeding into each other.

For example, the second story, "The Rook," one of the escapees turns up dead and murdered in a hotel room, which is solved, but Piper has some lingering questions regarding the circumstances of the murder ("...we're being maneuvered into making exactly the moves that someone wants us to make"). So even with the killer in custody, the murder continues to cause trouble later on in the story. That makes for a very short, very compact novel of no more than six "chapters," but, as previously mentioned, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery is not merely a mystery novelty item. Solution to what lies behind the prison bust and trail of bodies, or what the hypothesized big caper could, is original, imaginative and fairly clued. Piper even tries to buy time in the last chapter by going over all six clues. I found one clue particularly ingenious and think many of today's detective fans would agree.

Let me tell you, I did some self-congratulatory back-patting when the solution I pieced together turned out to be correct. I half expected I got hold of a juicy red herring, but the modern-day Mycroft Holmes right on the money. When a detective story is actually good, like The Will o' the Wisp Mystery, the readers always wins whether you solve it or get properly hoodwinked – because both are satisfying for different reasons. For me, anyway. Just for its titular story, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery comes highly recommended.

This collection has more to offer as it includes all seven short stories in the short, but long-lived, series about an inner city priest, Father David Noone. Mead described Father Noone as "a decidedly off-beat creation," compared to other clerical sleuths, who deals with the grittier, urban crimes of modern America. Simply put, they tend to be more character focused stories than most of Hoch's mysteries. Well, they aim for that early post-WWII realism. Hoch himself has said in an interview Father Noone is a character he kept "around for just the right type of story" appearing only sporadically in his short stories. Father Noone's first three appearances were spread out over a twenty-some year period from 1963 to 1985, while the final four were published between 2002 and 2004.

"Game of Skill," originally published in the December, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, introduces Father Noone as he takes over the duties of the absent Monsignor at St. Monica's. On a Monday evening, Father Noone gets a threatening phone call from a man, "I'm going to blow up your church on Sunday morning." The man calls back everyday with the same threat, but everyday with a bit more venom. Father Noone is, of course, much more interested in reaching out to this troubled soul and tries to engage with him every time the phone rings. This builds up towards the Sunday mass with, story-and character-wise, an effective ending, but otherwise not much of a detective story. Hoch's early work, especially from the 1960s, is a bit spotty as some stories were just typical, gloomy 1960s crime stories (e.g. "The Oblong Room," 1967).

The next story, "The Thing in Lovers' Lane," first appeared in the July, 1971, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and is a slight improvement on the first story published eight years previously. Father Noone's parish is rocked to its foundation when a young priest, Father Kling, is killed, under compromising circumstances, in a lovers' lane – dying in the arms of a woman named Stella. Both were "shot to death in the front seat of her car." Understanding the true relationship between the two victims is the key to solving the case. A marginal improvement over the first story with a little bit more meat to the plot, but the "clueing" here shows Hoch was more interested in the characters than the plot (ROT13: jul qebc gur X jura Y jbhyq unir orra fb zhpu orggre, orpnhfr Fgryyn Xvat fbhaqf orggre naq n yvggyr rnfvre gb zvff guna Fgryyn Yvat, juvpu whfg fgnaqf bhg).

I reviewed the third story in the series last year, but "The Sweating Statue" (1985) is the best of the three Father Noone stories published before the 2000s. Yes, it helped that has a solid and somewhat unique impossible situation to center the story and characters around.

"One More Circus," originally published in the May, 2002, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is the first Father Noone short story from the second, short-lived period in the series from the early 2000s. So you get a far more polished story from an older, experienced Hoch than the first two stories from the '60s and early '70s. And it shows! Father Noone is asked to take on the duties as temporary chaplain for the performers of the Breen Brothers circus out in Montana, because "the Catholic Church in America was besieged by an acute shortage of priests." Father Noone agrees as it's only a three-day job, "you wouldn't miss any Sunday Masses," but his stay at the circus ends with a terrible, tragic accident revealed to be a cleverly-disguised murder – before reverting back to being a tragedy. In some ways, “One More Circus” is a similar to "Game of Skill," but the ending is better handled and thus far more effective. Even though it's not much of a detective story.

"The Arrow of Ice," original to the anthology Murder Most Catholic: Divine Tales of Profane Crimes (2002), finds Father Noone's parish during a tumultuous period. A part of his parish, "clinging to the past," are in a uproar over the plans to renovate and modernized the church. They're demonstrating the plans and the architect, Porter Macklin, who's going to redesign the church. Meanwhile, the other parishioners are preparing for an upcoming festival featuring ice sculptures. Between all of this, the visiting architect is found murdered in the kitchen of the rectory with a sliver of ice sticking out of his bloodied throat. This is one of Hoch's lesser-known, rarely discussed stories and so hoped, based on the title, it would be some clever take on the impossible crimes with the normally trite icicle weapons, but no such thing. Just a competently put together, but unremarkable, whodunit. Same can be more or less said about the next story.

"The Hand of God," first published in the January, 2003, issue of EQMM, brings Father Noone to St. Joan of Arc college to attend a conference, but it gets cancelled when a sophomore student, Darcy Clemence, is shot and killed. A second body is soon found suggesting suicide with the victim having left behind a suicide note and confession on his computer ("I didn't mean to kill her"). So was it a murder/suicide or a double murder? I think the best aspects of "The Hand of God" is its college setting and Father Noone hitting upon the solution during a performance by college drama club of Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story. Both helped to prop up the plot and solution.

"Searching for Sammy Sand," originally published in the August, 2004, issue of EQMM, is the seventh and final story in the Father Noone series. There's still a shortage of priests and Father Noone is asked to act as chaplain at the county jail, until they have a permanent replacement. One of the prisoners, Roger Colone, claims to be innocent and asks Father Noone to help him find a man by the name of Sammy Sand. Colone is a landlord who rented one of his houses, off the book, to this Sammy Sand, but turned the place into a drug house. What's more, the refrigerator, "often contains chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs," was booby trapped with a grenade. However, it was a police officer who opened the fridge and died in the explosion. And, of course, Sammy Sand is nowhere to be found. So it was Colone who was left holding the bag. Father Noone can never ignore a plea for help and begins to snoop around. The plot behind the elusive Sammy Sand and the booby trapped fridge is not terribly complex, but Hoch created some pleasing plot-patterns out of this atypical situation for a detective story. I suppose its fitting this series ends with Noone telling the culprit, "I can hear your confession."

So how to rate The Will o' the Wisp Mystery as a whole? The titular story, or short novel, is the main attraction of the collection and worth the price of admission alone, but the Father Noone stories are the customary mixed bag. "The Sweating Statue" is the standout of the series and “Searching for Sammy Sand” is probably the only other story that'll stick in my mind, which probably not going to be true for the other stories – especially the first two. But then again, I'm probably not the right person to appreciate this series. So get the collection for The Will o' the Wisp Mystery and take the Father Noone stories as an extra.

Dead to Rights: "Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer" (1974) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer," originally appeared in the August, 1974, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in Leopold's Way (1985), starts out with a routine case for Captain Leopold and Lieutenant Fletcher – a simple case "without a hint of ghosts or impossibilities." Captain Leopold is ready to go home when a fatal shooting is reported on the 15th floor of the Grant Tower.

Martha Aspeth, a cleaning woman working at the Grant Tower, was shot by her estranged husband, Kurt Aspeth ("he wanted younger ones"). Leopold and Fletcher has plenty of eyewitnesses, "five women who work with her," who all saw it happen. Kurt came up to the 15th floor, asked for Martha and "pulled out his gun and started shooting" the moment he laid eyes on her. He then made his exit through the fire escape. So all they basically have to do is send out an alert, wait for him to be picked up and hand the matter over to the prosecutor. A simple, clear cut and uncomplicated case that turns into an impossible crime over night.

Following morning, Fletches has a good news, bad news situation for Leopold. Good news is that they found they found their suspect. Kurt Aspeth had crashed his car into a bridge abutment, on the Expressway near the Grant Tower building, which killed him instantly. However, according to the evidence, the smashup happened about thirty minutes before the shooting where Kurt was "positively identified as the murderer by five witnesses" – who all knew him personally. I liked how Hoch immediately dismissed the obvious, hackneyed explanations. A discrepancy in the records appears out of the question as the accident report is backed up by the medical report. No error due to daylight-saving time or faulty clocks. Kurt's body was identified by his older brother, Felix, who has a passing, brotherly resemblance, but couldn't pass for his twin brother. Fingerprints back up the identification! Felix believes "his brother's spirit killed Martha, after the accident." 

Leopold and Fletcher are far too grounded and sober minded to take any stock in Felix's claims that "his brother's spirit killed Martha, after the accident," but then what happened during those thirty minutes?

"Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer" is one of Hoch's most John Dickson Carr-like impossible crime stories, despite not being a typical impossible crime or traditional locked room mystery. A cross between ghostly phenomenon and bi-location. Hoch brings more than his usual competent craftsmanship to the table in order to explain away this apparent miracle with an inspired solution both imaginative and completely satisfying. There is, perhaps, one coincidence some readers might find a little hard to swallow, but that's that Merrivalean cussedness of all things general for you. However, what I found even more impressive is the overall structure of the story. Hoch took an unfortunate, every day case of spousal murder without a hint of planning or touch of subtlety (i.e. manufactured alibis, locked rooms, etc) and turned it into a Carr-like impossible crime story by introducing an apparent "glitch" in the timeline. It worked. Mike Grost called "Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer" a "landmark in such time-centered mysteries" in the Chesterton-Carr tradition and I couldn't agree more. If there's ever going to be a Hoch best-of collection, "Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer" deserves to be included.

The Devil's Pet Baits: "A Melee of Diamonds" (1972) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "A Melee of Diamonds," originally published in the April, 1972, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected in Leopold's Way (1985), begins with a crude, everyday crime – a simple smash-and-grab job. A man wielding a silver-headed cane smashes the store window of the Midtown Diamond Exchange to pocket a modest fortune in diamond rings and unset stones, but a patrolling police officer is immediately on the scene. And gets knocked down with the cane. Fortunately, a bystander chases the thief, wrestles him to the ground and hands him over to the police. So case closed, except for one small, all-important, detail: what happened to the diamonds?

The thief, Rudy Hoffman from New York, took $58,000 worth of diamonds from the broken store window before getting apprehended half a block away. From the time Hoffman smashed the store window to the moment he was tackled to the ground, "he was in sight of at least one person every instant until they arrested him." However, Hoffman didn't have a single diamond on him. The police searched him, the street and they "even searched the patrol car he was in after his arrest" without finding a single diamond ring or unset stone. Hoffman isn't talking.

So when Captain Leopold hears a report the following days, he asks to have him brought down "to show you guys how it's done" with similar results. This apparently simple smash-and-grab from a store window is not one of Captain Leopold's finest hours as he's in full fallible detective mode ("this is my night for being wrong"). Even when the missing diamonds and the solution are literally gifted to him on a silver platter.

Captain Leopold pulls an impossible vanishing-act with the diamonds himself, in order to manipulate an accomplice in drawing out the main culprit, but it horribly misfires and, to use his own words, "I was trying to pull off a neat trick, and I got a guy killed" – "I bungled, that's what happened, Fletcher." Captain Leopold got it wrong one more time that night, before he can finally and successfully close the case.

So, while Captain Leopold was stuck in fallible detective mode, I played Mycroft Holmes and deduced the correct solution to the first impossibility. And, what exactly, happened the moment the store window got smashed. A not wholly unoriginal trick complimented by the smash-and-grab setup that allowed me to anticipate the identity of the main culprit. On the other hand, Leopold's trick honestly had me stumped and it's not even half as good or original as the first vanishing-trick. But it served its purpose. So, while not a perfect detective story, "A Melee of Diamonds" stands as another pretty solid, competently-plotted effort from the prolific Hoch enjoyably demonstrating the versatility of the impossible crime story outside the customary locked room and fields of virgin snow. Recommended!

Note for the curious: I also reviewed the short story collection The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) and the Captain Leopold short story "The Oblong Room" (1967).

Check's in the Mail: "The Problem of the Pink Post Office" (1981) by Edward D. Hoch

I finished Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series when Crippen & Landru published its fifth and final collection of short stories, Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018), which gave closure to one of Hoch's most popular and long-running series – running from 1974 to 2008 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. So haven't visited the good doctor for "another small—ah—libation" since then and other Hoch collections beckon for my attention, but there's a short story I wanted to revisit.

A few years ago, "The Dark One," of A Perfect Locked Room, reviewed Hoch's More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006) and it reminded me of a particular story that had inexplicably escaped my attention when compiling "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries."

"The Problem of the Pink Post Office," originally published in the June, 1981, issue of EQMM, takes place on October 24, 1929 – a day better known as Black Thursday. While the stock markets began to panic, the small town of Northmont is looking forward that day to the opening own, separate post office away from the general store. The brand new post office, "a pink post office," receives its last lick of fresh paint when the postmistress, Vera Brock, opens its doors for business. Among her first customers is Anson Waters, the town banker, who tells them about the panic down on Wall Street and needs to send his broker "a railroad bearer bond in the amount of ten thousand dollars" ("my broker can cash it at once"). Something everyone in the post office overhears and the registered envelope goes missing without a trace.

Fortunately, Dr. Sam Hawthorne and Sheriff Lens are two of the seven people present at the post office when the envelope disappeared. Dr. Hawthorne states "there are seven of us here, and I can offer seven solutions." The fast moving procession of false-solutions and them getting shot down almost as quickly is one of the highlights of this short story, however, the false-solution serve an even more important purpose than merely entertaining genre savvy detective geeks.

"The Problem of the Pink Post Office" starts out as an Ellery Queen-style "hidden object" puzzle, which is impossible crime adjacent, but Hawthorne knocking down his own false-solutions and eliminating all the suspects turned it into a fully fledged locked room mystery. Next comes the tricky part as the story has to, fittingly enough, deliver an eighth solution to the problem that has to be a little more than good. Hoch more than delivered on not only the story's premise, but on Hawthorne's opening statement that "The Problem of the Pink Post Office" is "unique among all the cases" he helped to solve. A shrewdly clued solution of beautiful simplicity which yet feels satisfying and original, because the trick is tailor-made for this story. A small gem and one of my favorite impossible crime stories from Hoch!

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.

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!

The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) by Edward D. Hoch

The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) is the thirteenth volume of Edward D. Hoch's fiction, published by Crippen & Landru, collecting fifteen short stories from his series of police procedurals featuring one of his most enduring creations, Captain Jules Leopold – who appeared in over a hundred short stories. A not inconsiderable chunk of Hoch's output counting nearly a thousand short stories covering more than a dozen different series and standalone stories.

Captain Leopold is the head of the Violent Crimes Squad of Monroe, a fictitious town somewhere in Connecticut, who's a normal, competent and levelheaded policeman. So he's basically a modern-day Inspector French. Being one of Hoch's rare conventional characters doesn't mean his caseload is always normal or everyday. I know Captain Leopold from the odd anthologized short story which tended to be locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories. I suppose the known of these stories "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) in which Captain Leopold is framed for the murder of his ex-wife, but not to be overlooked is "Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder" (1976) staging a locked room slaying in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam.

There is, of course, more to the Captain Leopold series than an excellent impossible crime story or locked room mystery every now and then. Roland Lacourbe illustrated this in his excellent introduction and detailed overview of the series, "The Best of Captain Leopold," which opens The Killer Everyone Knew. A insightful, non-spoiler introduction for those not overly familiar with the series or are new to it and a refresher course for those who might not have encountered Captain Leopold for while. After all, the last Captain Leopold story, "Leopold Undercover" (2007), was published seventeen years ago and The Killer Everyone Knew is the first Captain Leopold collection since Leopold's Way (1985). So this publication was long overdue. Even longer than that second Ben Snow collection.

Lastly, before delving into this collection, the stories in The Killer Everyone Knew originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1981 to 2000. Yes, this is a shoddy attempt to prevent another unnecessary long and bloated SSC review. So with that out of the way...

The first story, "The Woman Without a Past" (1981), confronts Captain Leopold with the double murder of an unmarried couple, Judy Thomas and Carl Forrester, who were gunned down on their own doorstep when returning home from a birthday dinner. She has a past going back only ten months before it goes completely blank and he has forty-eight cans of ether in the closet. So who was the killer after, Judy or Carl? A good and intriguing setup, but, in the end, not much of a mystery as the culprit is glaringly obvious in spite of wearing the garb of the least-likely-suspect. I think the next story would have made a better opener to this otherwise excellent collection.

"Captain Leopold Beats the Machine" (1983) is a neat little impossible poisoning mystery. Tommy Rusto is a two-bit criminal implicated in the fatal car bombing of Vice-Mayor Mark Prior, but now that his trial is coming up, he's ready to talk and name names. So the D.A. asks Captain Leopold to borrow their interrogation room and for him to be present as a witness, which is when things take a turn for the worst as Rusto asks for a cup of coffee – brought to him by Captain Leopold. Rusto takes a sip of the coffee, mutters something about the taste of the coffee ("this coffee tastes...") and drops dead from cyanide poisoning. The coffee came from the vending machine of the police squad, which is taken apart and closely examined, but is proven to be clean and not tampered with. So who poisoned the stool pigeon and how? Well, those are, admittedly, not terrible difficult questions to answer and it's strange Leopold is never considered as a suspect. Nevertheless, it's a good, timely example of the detective story exploring new possibilities technology can bring to the table (beside a cyanide laced coffee) and loved the clue that identified the murderer. To quote Leopold, "this is truly the age of the machine."

The third story, "Finding Joe Finch" (1984), begins with the announcement of Captain Leopold's engagement to Molly Calendar, a defense lawyer, who appeared in the previous story as Rusto's legal representative. A strain is placed on the engagement following a deadly payroll robbery at the Greenways factory. The primary suspects is one of the factory workers, Joe Finch, who's nowhere to be found. Not to mention that he's the brother-in-law of Lieutenant Fletcher. This causes some problems at home ("...you're all the same, aren't you?"). So more of a police procedural with troubled cops than a proper detective story, but the clueing is fair and the factory setting well realized. And added something to everything from the characters and storytelling to the plot.

I already reviewed "The Murder in Room 1010" (1987) back in June alongside Hoch's "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper" (1987) and "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" (1991), but it's a small gem of an impossible crime story.

"The Crime in Heaven" (1988) boosts one of Hoch's most creative and original setups when a woman comes to Captain Leopold to report a murder far, far outside of his jurisdiction. Mrs. Roberts has been communicating with the spirit of her grandfather, dead for half a century, through the medium Madame Vane and her spirit guide, Grey Elk ("they're often Indians, you know") – whom she accuses of murdering her dead grandfather! During their last séance, Mrs. Roberts heard the voice of Grey Elk screaming at her grandfather and someone saying, "put down that gun," before a gunshot rang out. Nothing was heard after the shot and Madame Vane refused any more seances. Something weird or unusual happened, but where do you even begin to investigate when "the murder victim was a man who's already been dead for fifty-five years"? Captain Leopold's colleague, Sergeant Connie Trent, plays a big role in unraveling this criminal scheme gone horribly awry. Simply a great story with an original approach to presenting and picking apart a plot.

The title story of this collection, "The Killer Everyone Knew" (1989), begins when Captain Leopold is visited by a criminal psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Frees, who works with convicted murderers. Dr. Frees regresses them through hypnosis to the moment of the murder and he's convinced one of his patients is innocent. Five years ago, Ralph Simmons was identified by several witnesses as the man "who'd taken Laurie Mae Nelson out to her car in the parking lot and strangled her." So he was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to twenty years to life ("...still protesting his innocence"), but now Dr. Frees claims his hypnotic sessions uncovered Simmons was "nowhere near the scene of the crime that night." Captain Leopold is more than a little skeptical, but promises to look over the file. And the case notes don't look too promising. But, curiously, it turns out the witnesses have begun to die. This story is a bit of downer as it obviously leans more to the serious crime story/police procedural, but how Leopold uses a chain-of-knowledge, rather than evidence, to identify the murderer is not bad. That and it was interesting how Hoch decided to tackle the shopworn premise of a man innocently convicted of murder.

If you think "The Killer Everyone Knew" is a bit depressing, you haven't read "Captain Leopold's Birthday" (1990). Captain Leopold is not looking forward to his coming birthday as the department's mandatory retirement policy is "now only twelve short months away." On top of that, Leopold learns that an ex-colleague from the Arson Squad, Marty Doyle, died from a heart attack a year into his early retirement. Something that has unexpected consequences when one of the Doyles neighbors is shot to death with a target pistol and Leopold has to investigate a murder involving people he knows personally. A dark, gloomy and somewhat depressing cop drama/police procedural, but Hoch (SPOILER/ROT13) uvatrq gur jubyr guvat ba n pyrireyl uvqqra, grpu-onfrq nyvov hfvat gur pncgnva uvzfrys nf n jvgarff. So I didn't hate it, nor loved it, but definitely liked how it reads like a miniature version of a Roger Ormerod novel with its dead ex-cop and use of a target pistol as murder weapon.

The cover image of this collection comes from the next story, "The Retired Magician" (1991), which plays out over the course of several months. Captain Leopold learns that the famous stage magician, Rex Furcula, retired to Monroe and bought a house complete with a small carriage house to store his magic collection and memorabilia – nothing much was heard of him for several years. Two years later, Furcula sister is murdered when she caught a burglar in the carriage house and killer is killed himself during his getaway. So an open and shut case. Over the course of several months, Leopold and Molly become acquainted with Furcula and his wife. Leopold begins to like the Furcula's, but suspicion begins to sneak in when he learns about a one-million dollar life insurance policy. Just like in a magic act, "nothing is ever quite what it seems." I enjoyed the deliberate vagueness, but clued, of the setup punctuated by a new wrinkle on a classic idea. A solid Hoch short story!

"Puzzle in a Smoke Filled Room" (1991) is another story with a premise as intriguing as it's original. The men of Fire Company 5 respond to a house fire and find a woman in pajamas on the doorstep begging to save her husband who went to bed early, but, when entering the burning, smoke filled bedroom, they hear the crack of an exploding cartridge. Firefighter Randy Dwyer is fatally hit in the chest by bullet. The victim of a bizarre, but not an unheard-of, accident in which "the intense heat of the fire had detonated the powder charge in several pistol cartridges stored in the homeowner's bedroom." However, the bullet that was removed from the body has lands and grooves on its sides proving "it had been fired from a gun barrel." Captain Leopold and his team go from a freak accident to a quasi-impossible murder. So it's unfortunate the solution doesn't hold up. I can overlook Leopold not immediately grasping (SPOILER/ROT13) gur fvtavsvpnapr bs na rkvg jbhaq gung fubhyqa'g or gurer, ohg jung nobhg gur cngubybtvfg? Fubhyqa'g ur, bs nyy crbcyr, abgvpr gur obql unf bayl bar ragel jbhaq naq bar rkvg jbhaq, ohg fgvyy qht n ohyyrg bhg bs gur ivpgvz'f purfg? Juvyr gur frpbaq ohyyrg jnf sverq guebhtu gur svefg ohyyrg jbhaq, vg qvqa'g sbyybj gur genpx bs gur svefg ohyyrg be gurl jbhyq unir pbyyvqrq. Naq gur cngubybtvfg jbhyq unir qht gjb fyhtf bhg bs gur obql. So loved how the story was presented, but its resolution left me unconvinced. Only just realized the method is basically a poor, simplified reworking of a rather elaborate trick from another and better Captain Leopold story.

"The Summer of Our Discontent" (1992) is not so much a detective story as it's an important character-arc. Captain Leopold has the long-dreaded retirement talk with Chief Ringold and agrees to retire by the end of the month. Everyone assumed Lieutenant Fletcher is going to be promoted to captain and appointed commander of the Violent Crimes Squad, but Chief Ringold tells him Lieutenant George Vivian, of the Burglary Squad, is picked as his successor – which comes as a smack in their face. Things get worse when one of Vivian's men, Sergeant Patrick O'Mera, is found shot dead in his patrol car with evidence suggesting bribery and corruption. The excellent and fitting motive behind the murder should have made this story a worthy retirement case for Captain Leopold, but everything felt mired in needless cop drama. So the story becomes more about how this murder is going to ruin Vivian's promotion and hand it back to Fletcher rather than allowing Leopold to tidy up his last case, before officially handing over the reigns to Fletcher. Why not do the same thing, except (ROT13) Ivivna trgf cebzbgrq gb pncgnva naq pbzznaqre bs gur Ohetynel Fdhnq? Gung jnl, gur zbgvir fgvyy jbexf jvgubhg gur fbncl qenzn gung pbhyq bayl raq bar jnl.

"Leopold at Rest" (1993) is a minor, but pleasantly surprising, story showing Fletcher in Leopold's role as head of the Violent Crimes Squad handling everyday routine cases like an attempted murder. Charlie McGregor was shot by his wife's lover, Tod Baxter, who's released after his brother backed the half-million dollar bail. Another story that's pleasantly mysterious about the direction of the story, but the ending delivered. Not a very happy ending, but unexpectedly good after the previous two stories. This series is strong on unexpected, original motives and cleverly-hidden criminal schemes. So even the stories leaning heavily in the direction of the dark, grim police procedural and character-driven crime fiction feel more substantial, because they have a plot to stand on.

"Leopold Lends a Hand" (1995) is another good one bringing together the classically-styled detective story and the modern police procedural. Captain Fletcher is short staffed, "more cases than the Violent Crime Squad can handle at the moment," which is why he asked Leopold to help out with some routine questioning of witnesses at the scene of a murder. Construction workers discovered the body of Vladimir Petrov, a Russian businessman, when they returned to work on his million dollar, partially finished condominium – shot twice in the chest. Petrov possessed a couple of antique religious icon, dating back to sixth or seventh century, which are worth a small fortune and considered to be potential motive. Only then Fletcher is shot and seriously wounded. Suddenly, Leopold is back on the job as "acting head of the Violent Crimes division," when another complication rears it ugly head. The woman who appraised one of the icons, Rachel Dean, is shot and killed behind the locked door and barred windows of her private office. She lived long enough to leave behind a dying message! A detective story with a dying message inside a locked room comes with certain expectations, regarding the solution, but Hoch delivers the goods. More importantly, it came with that jolt of surprise I remember from my first encounters with Agatha Christie. I need to nitpick a little here and point out the central idea behind the locked room-trick had been tried before, one or two times, but Hoch arguably employed it to greater effect.

I didn't like the next story, "The Mystery That Wouldn't Stay Solved" (1997), which brings a true crime writer to the retired Leopold to discuss one of his old cases. Nine years ago, Alex Clemmins received the death penalty for the car bombing that killed his wife and their two young children. Now that the execution is less than a week away, the case is getting renewed attention in the media with rumors swirling around about new evidence. Leopold begins to suspect "the evidence that convicted him might be flawed." The previous stories set the precedent that even the stories leaning more towards the police procedurals and crime stories aren't without plot virtues, but that's not the case here. If "Leopold Helps a Hand" shows what the traditional, but modernized, detective story could have been in the nineties, "The Mystery That Wouldn't Stay Solved" rubs the tripe we got instead in your face.

"The Phantom Lover" (1999) is another fairly minor, unusually structured story beginning as a missing person's case. Stanley Falkner is fairly well-known in the city, "a local Realtor who dabbled in politics," who had a very public, headline making brawl with Lynn at a restaurant ("she'd jabbed him in the neck with a salad fork..."). So she becomes a person of interest when her husband goes missing and is found shortly thereafter dead in a gravel pit. Surprisingly, Lynn comes clean halfway through and confesses she conspired with her lover, Gavin Stark, to dispose her husband – which gets her indicted on two counts ("second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder"). However, the so-called phantom lover is nowhere to be found and when she recants her confession, the case against her threatens to collapse. Lynn has a rock solid alibi for the time Gavin killed Stanley. So, unless the D.A. can produce Lynn's lover, there's "no way the D.A. can prove a conspiracy." Captain Fletcher has his work cut out as Leopold is "following this case closely in the papers." Like I said, the structure is unusual, for a detective story, but the truth behind the phantom lover left me unimpressed.

The final story, "The Emerald Expert" (2000), ends the collection on a high note. Leopold and Molly open their home to a French gemologist, Henri Scarlotti, who has come to the United States to testify as an expert witness on behalf of the defense in the Jaspar case. Jeff Shields and Beryl Constantine, his girlfriend, stand trial for the murdering and robbing of a jewelry salesman, Alex Jaspar. Both were caught in New York when they tried to dispose of the stolen emeralds, or so the prosecution claims, but they claim to be innocent. Scarlotti can apparently prove the emerald they tried to sell in New York were mined in a different location than Jaspar's stolen emeralds ("...a small sample from the gem's surface is measured for oxygen isotopes"). This provides the story with fascinating sidelight on emeralds and emerald mining, before the home of the Leopolds becomes a crime scene. Scarlotti was shot and killed in their home! The solution is pretty solid with a surprising killer and, once again, an original motive. So a fine and fitting story to close out this overall excellent collection of Captain Leopold stories.

Lacourbe writes in the introduction that the stories have "verve and imagination" in their variation with "the weirdness of many of the situations" standing "in sharp contrast to the seeming banality of the cases themselves." Something all the stories in this collection can attest to, whether they're good or not, but it's also impressive when you hold the stories up to Hoch's other series. Lacourbe notes that Leopold is one of Hoch's most grounded series-character. Leopold is not a gunslinger from the Wild West (Ben Snow), a thief-for-hire (Nick Velvet), a locked room expert (Dr. Hawthorne) or an immortal detective (Simon Ark). Just a normal, everyday homicide cop who relies as much on his experience as he does on his intelligence and Hoch genuinely tried to create miniature versions of the then contemporary, character-driven crime drama's and police procedurals – complete with their dark, gritty tone and bleak endings. So not everyone is going to like, what Mike Grost dubbed, "The Gloomy Tales," but I admired Hoch craftily giving a classical twist to most of these bleak, gritty modern-day police procedurals. And with only four less than stellar stories, The Killer Everyone Knew ensured Leopold's Way is on its way to the top of the pile. Simply a must-read for Hoch fans!

A note for the curious: if you ever wondered what the mostly untranslated, Dutch police procedurals/detective stories by M.P.O. Books/"Anne van Doorn" are like, The Killer Everyone Knew comes pretty close to the short stories collected in De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018) and Meer mysteries voor Robbie Corbijn (More Mysteries for Robbie Corbijn, 2021). Just throwing that out as a reminder there's still some untranslated gold over here.

Water from a Stone: "The Sweating Statue" (1985) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Sweating Statue" is the third short story to feature his modern-day Father Brown character, Father David Noone, who's one of Hoch's lesser-known series-characters – appearing in only half a dozen short stories since the 1960s. Hoch has said he always kept the character of Father Noone around for "just the right type of story."

"The Sweating Statue," originally published in Detectives A-Z: 26 Stories with a Sleuth for Every Letter of the Alphabet (1985) and reprinted in Murder Most Sacred (1989), is exactly such a short story. Father David Noone is a parish priest in large, unnamed city and a so-called miracle has brought nationwide attention to his aging inner city.

Two weeks previously, the first arrivals for morning Mass arrived and noticed that the wooden statue of the Virgin on the side altar "seemed covered with sweat." The statue was wiped clean, but statue started to sweat again a few moments later. Father Noone tries to convince his parishioners that no miracle has taken place. After all, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown once famously remarked, "miracles are not so cheap as all that," but it keeps happening – every day the morning Mass crowd gets bigger. Even the media is starting to pay attention. That brings Monsignor Thomas Xavier, "the Cardinal's troubleshooter," to Holy Trinity Church to investigate this reported miracle. However, "the statue seems to be having a ripple effect on the lives of a great many people." Such as the very religious Celia Orlando and her non-religious boyfriend, Kevin Frisk, who thinks Father Noone is filling her head with "crazy notions of a miracle." This situation culminates with Father Noone discovering the body of the church custodian, Marcos, beneath a flight of stairs with a broken neck. And that brings even more media attention to the place ("man found dead at "miracle" church"). So what the hell is going on?

Curiously enough, Father Noone's role as series-detective is usurped Monsignor Xavier, which I assume was done to give Detectives A-Z anthology an entry for "X." Monsignor Xavier is the one who notices the two tell-tale clues that neatly explain how a statue can sweat bullets and why Marcos ended up dead at the bottom of the stairs. Short, simple and satisfying. So another solid short story effort from Hoch with a very well handled impossible situation.

Just one little side comment. Mike Grost comments on his website that he doesn't share the general enthusiasm for this story, "the mystery of the statue itself, is solidly done," but finds the story too grim and gloomy in its storytelling with all of the characters (believers and non-religious alike) cast in a negative light. I agree to a certain extend. "The Sweating Statue" is simply a good detective story, but the characters and situation used to tell that detective story needed to be fleshed out more. I think the story would have hit very differently, if it had the room to tell why Kevin Frisk is a militant atheist or why an extremely religious woman like Celia Orlando loved him. Or why Father Noone appeared to be so passive throughout the story. I imagine a novel-length treatment of "The Sweating Statue" would read like Andrew M. Greeley-style impossible crime novel (e.g. Happy Are Those Who Mourn, 1995), except the plot wouldn't be a huge letdown.