The Thieving 'Tec: "The Theft of the Venetian Window" (1975) and "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" (1983) by Edward D. Hoch

For the past two years, I've been reading a lot of single short stories covering a 100-year period, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but noticed my last short story review was posted in March – discussing Mike Wiecek's techno-thriller "The End of the Train" (2007). So it was time to return to the short story and decided on a pair of locked room mysteries written by the master of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch.

Over a career that spanned half a century, Hoch wrote close to a thousand short stories and created a whole host of popular detectives-characters. Some more well-known than others.

Nick Velvet was created in 1966 as, to use Hoch's own words, an answer to Ian Fleming's James Bond. A modern, sophisticated thief specialized in "unlikely thefts of valueless objects," but, like many fictional thieves before him, Velvet often had to play detective in order "to accomplish his mission, free himself from a frame-up or collect his fee" – which is easier said than done. Particularly when the problem he has to solve is of the impossible variety.

"The Theft of the Venetian Window" was originally published in the November, 1975, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Velvet is engaged by Milo Mason to go to Venice, Italy, to steal a mirror that he considers to be "the most valuable object on the face of the earth." Mason assures Velvet that the value of the mirror is not monetary, but spiritual, because the mirror is a window, or doorway, to an alternative universe and claims "the mirror might have inspired Lewis Carroll." So he accepts the assignment and goes to Venice to meet with the owner of the mirror, Giorgio Lambazi, but then everything goes horribly wrong.

During their conversation, Velvet drops sleeping pills into Lambazi's espresso, but, before the drug took effect, Lambazi asks him to leave and he has to wait outside the door until the old man goes to sleep. After fifteen minutes, Velvet begins to skillfully pick the lock and unscrewing the chain-link bolt, but, upon reentering the apartment, he finds Lambazi apparently peacefully slumbering in his chair before the mirror – except that his throat had been neatly cut! Lambazi had been alone in the apartment. The only door was locked and bolted with Velvet standing outside it all the time and the only window, overlooking the canal, was "shuttered and bolted on the inside." So how did the killer get in and out?

Surprisingly, considering the premise of the story, "The Theft of Venetian Window" worked better as whodunit than as an impossible crime story, because the locked room-trick is disappointingly simplistic. Easily one of Hoch's most basic and simplest locked room-tricks, which is disappointing coming on the heels of an intriguingly posed impossibility. Nevertheless, Velvet still has to earn his $20,000 fee and how he collects it makes it a worthwhile read, but certainly not one of Hoch's classic short stories.

If you want a second opinion on this story, I recommend you read Christian Henriksson's "Stray Impossibilities – Part Hoch," posted on Mysteries, Short and Sweet, who praised the solution to the locked room murder as "excellent in all its simplicity."

"The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" was originally published in the March, 1983, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and introduces "a highly skilled antagonist," Sandra Paris a.k.a. The White Queen, who specializes in impossible feats before breakfast – in the manner of the White Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Velvet first heard of the White Queen from Rooster Vitale, a minor organized-crime figure, who wants to hire him "to steal a roomful of furniture." But he never steals anything of value. So the job goes to the White Queen and she delivers on her promise in a seemingly impossible manner!

One morning, Douglas Shelton passes his study to the kitchen to make his breakfast, glancing inside to see if everything was already, but, as he was squeezing oranges, he gets a phone call asking him to take a look at his study. The study was completely empty. In the few minutes Shelton had been preparing breakfast, someone had managed to remove all the furniture, but this was not the last escapade of the White Queen. The next day a roulette wheel from an unused gaming table at the Golden Fleece casino vanished with the place full of people!

Velvet decides to confront Sandra Paris about cutting into his business, but learns Rooster hasn't paid her fee yet, because there was supposed to be papers hidden, somewhere, in the stolen furniture. So she offers him his usual fee to find the papers in the stolen furniture that she had already "reduced to rubble in a futile attempt to find the papers," which makes for a good, Ellery Queen-like hidden object puzzle with a double-layered solution. Velvet also to figure out how every stick of furniture was taken out of the study within a couple of minutes and how the roulette wheel vanished from the middle of a crowded casino, but Velvet also has reputation to protect and makes a bet with the White Queen that he can steal her menu at breakfast some morning – she promises to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars if he succeeds. And he earns his money by making the menu miraculously disappear from her hands. Hoch showed why he was master of the short story with the casual revelation of the solution to this third and final impossible disappearance.

My only objection is that Paris should have immediately figured out how the menu disappeared, but, in every other regard, "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" is a splendid and richly plotted caper with no less than three miraculous disappearances. Somewhat reminiscent of Norman Berrow's caper The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) with the solution to disappearance of the furniture being the absolute highlight of the plot. The problem of the stolen roulette wheel and menu were very minor in comparison, but certainly added to the charm of the story about two master thieves locking horns. Definitely recommended!

The Frozen Teacher: "The Touch of Kolyada" (1989) by Edward D. Hoch

December is nearly upon us and, if you're an incurable mystery addict, you probably have some of festive detective novels, short stories and perhaps even an anthology, or two, lined up to read during the Christmas season – a Victorian tradition that is still very much alive in the detective story. One of my reasons to always start relatively early with reading and reviewing these seasonal mysteries is that the holiday season has the habit to begin prematurely in my country. You can usually get Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) candy as early as September or October.

Another reason is that I want to give my fellow mystery addicts a recommendation or two, before December, which is why I have tackled so many of the lesser-known Christmas-themed mystery novels. Such as Moray Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931), C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Francis Duncan's Murder for Christmas (1949).

So, today, I have a festive, quasi-impossible crime story that was intended for last year, but didn't get around to reading it then.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Touch of Kolyada" was originally written for a Christmas-themed anthology, Mistletoe Mysteries: Tales of Yuletide Murder (1989), edited by award-winning mystery writer, Charlotte Macleod. The detective of the story is the first detective-character Hoch ever created, Simon Ark, who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest wandering the world in the hope of meeting the devil in combat.

When the story opens, Simon Ark has been living at a university near "the northern tip of Manhattan," where he has been studying medieval legends, but "an unusual situation" has developed among some of his academic friends – a situation Ark described as "a mystery of good rather than evil." There are many Russian emigres on the faculty, who moved there with the family over the past twenty years. But a figure from Russian folklore appears to have followed them to America.

Kolyada is a beautiful elf maiden, cloaked in "a luxurious white robe and hood," who's said to ride a sleigh, from house to house, delivering gifts much as "Santa Claus does in Western countries." Recently, the children of the faculty members claim to have seen Kolyada. She has even entered homes to leave gifts for the children. So a very benevolent mystery, but it takes a dark, sinister turn when Ark and the narrator witness Kolyada appear behind the window of Professor Trevitz house.

A figure in a white-hooded robe carrying a basket, crammed with candy and fruit, who goes from the kitchen into the living-room where she bends over Professor Trevitz, who's sitting in a chair, touches his cheek with her outstretched fingers – only to flee when Ark yells out her name. When they enter the place, they discover the icy cold, solidly frozen body of the professor sitting in the chair. Suggesting that he had instantly frozen to death the moment the robed figure had touched him.

Unfortunately, Hoch never developed this premise into a full-fledged impossible crime and the story, which is not one of his greatest, sheds the intrigue of the opening pages to become regular, somewhat routine, detective story. This was a bit disappointing. Nonetheless, it was still a fun and unusual Christmas-themed detective story with a memorable set piece. I also enjoyed how much of the plot resembled the kind of stories you often find in Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed (Detective Conan) series. I can easily imagine Conan becoming involved with an utterly bizarre, borderline impossible murder apparently committed by ghostly figure from folklore and the motive didn't help dispel that illusion.

A note for the curious: I took "The Frozen Teacher," in the title of this blog-post, from an early Detective Conan story collected in volumes 14 and 15, which have been translated and are currently available in English. Just a friendly reminder that there's gold in those hills.

Anyway, "The Touch of Kolyada" is hardly one of Hoch's greatest detective stories, but a perfectly suitable Christmas read with a great premise, a memorable scene and a serviceable ending. So a little average, perhaps, but certainly not bad.

Lion's Den: "Circus in the Sky" (2000) by Edward D. Hoch

Back in March, I reviewed a short parody story by Jon L. Breen, entitled "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979), which satirized one of Edward D. Hoch's most popular and unforgettable series-characters, Dr. Sam Hawthorne – a country physician who's a magnet for seemingly impossible crimes. Breen littered his parody with passing references to unrecorded locked room problems that have taken place in the small New England town of Northsouth.

One of these references was to the inexplicable murder of a circus clown, who was mauled to death by "a lion on the fifth floor of the Northsouth Hotel," but "the lion was in his cage five blocks away." The idea behind these references was to describe a situation so utterly impossible that "no one could possibly solve it rationally." Twenty years later, Hoch found a solution to the problem and worked it into a short story.

"Circus in the Sky" was originally published in the anthology Scenes of Crimes (2000) and reprinted in the June, 2001, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The story is narrated by a computer programmer in his mid-twenties, whose name we never learn, working for a month in an unfamiliar city far from his home office and decides to kill a boring evening by going to circus – which no longer played "in big tops set up along the railroad tracks in cities like Omaha and Des Moines." A big circus were now arena events competing rock stars, ice shows and professional wrestling for the best dates.

After the show ended, the narrator goes to a late-night restaurant to have a drink and strikes up a conversation with the female lion tamer the Breen Brothers Circus, Mimi Gothery, whose stage-name is "Carpathia." They're interrupted by two policemen who request they accompany them to the seventeenth floor of the office building across the street. The body of a lawyer, Richard Strong, had been found in his high-rise office with his face and suit "shredded by bloody claw marks" as if "a lion had appeared from nowhere," lashed out violently, "and then vanished."

Richard Strong was "one of the business acting as clowns" at that night's performance, which is done for charitable or promotional reasons, but, during the lion tamer's act, he attempted to push some flowers on Carpathia. And he was brushed aside. However, the narrator is her alibi and the physical evidence is on her side, but it makes the murder look even more impossible than it already did.

The police matched the claw marks on the body with the paw of one of Carpathia's lions, Gus, but nobody believes she walked around that night with "a lion on a leash" and there are two witnesses, circus owner and a stable boy, who swear Gus was in his locked cage after his performance – either one or the other was around the lion's cage the entire night. So nobody could have taken him out of the cage to commit a murder in a very dangerous and roundabout way.

Breen has admitted he has no earthly idea how to explain the miracle problem he had posed in "The Problem of the Vanishing Town," but Hoch explained the conundrum of the invisible lion with a devilish ease with all clues you need to figure it out yourself (I did!). More importantly, the simple, down-to-earth explanation didn't fell flat coming on the tail-end of such a fantastical premise. You can almost describe "Circus in the Sky" as a Clayton Rawson impossible crime story ("Claws of Satan," 1940) as perceived by John Dickson Carr (The Unicorn Murders, 1935). And the fact that the central puzzle started out as a throw-away joke in a parody of Hoch added another layer to the overall story.

So, all in all, Hoch's "Circus in the Sky" is another one of those impossible crime stories baffling absent from any of the locked room-themed anthologies published during the last two decades, but anthologists should keep it in mind for potential future anthologies. This short story is vintage Hoch and shows why he was the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the American detective story (after Ellery Queen, of course). Highly recommended!

Myths and Murders: "The Case of the Modern Medusa" (1973) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch had a storied, decades-long career as a voluminous writer of short stories and passed away, in 2008, with close to a thousand short stories to his name, but he was equally productive when it came to creating series-characters – somewhere around twenty of them. Some where better known or had longer lifespans than others.

I've previously discussed short stories collections starring some of Hoch's most celebrated series-detectives, such as The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1971), The Ripper of Storyville (1997) and Challenge the Impossible (2018), but there's an entire roster of lesser-known, secondary series-characters whose stories have remained uncollected to this very day. A roster comprising of characters such as Father David Noone, Ulysses S. Bird, Sir Gideon Parrot and Paul Tower. Most of them only appeared in a handful of stories.

I've yet to encounter any of these characters, but plan to track down a couple of these uncollected stories from some of Hoch's short-lived, unsung series and found an excellent locked room mystery from the slightly more successful Interpol-series – counting fourteen stories that were published between 1973 and 1984 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The protagonists of this series are Sebastian Blue, "a middle-aged Englishman formerly of Scotland Yard," who now works for Interpol and has been paired with a promising talent from the translation department, Laura Charme, to investigate "airline crimes around the globe." They operate from an office on the top floor of the Interpol headquarters in Saint-Cloud, Paris, France.

The third story in the series, "The Case of the Modern Medusa," was originally published in the November, 1973, issue of EQMM and brings the two Interpol agents to Geneva, Switzerland.

Two years ago, Otto Dolliman opened a Mythology Fair in Geneva and it appears to be merely a tourist attraction, but Interpol has reasons to believe the Mythology Fair is a cover for "a gold-smuggling operation" linked to the world-wide narcotic trade. A suspicion strengthened when Gretchen Spengler, a West German airline stewardess, was murdered shortly after "the live-action tableaux" of Perseus slaying Medusa. Gretchen Spengled worked at the Fair during her spare time and Interpol believes she used her position, as a stewardess, to smuggle cold out of Switzerland. So they send down Charme to take Spengler's place, as Medusa, but a few days later, the murderer strikes a second time and this murder is an impossible crime – except that "the room wasn't really locked."

Otto Dolliman has a small office-room dominated by an eight-foot-tall statue of King Neptune, holding a very real and sharp trident, which was driven by the murderer into Dolliman's stomach. There are only two problems: the only window in the office was covered with a wire-mesh grille, firmly bolted in place, while the only (unlocked) door had been under constant observation by Sebastian Blue!

A great locked room situation with an excellent and original explanation, easily one of Hoch's better impossible crime stories, but as good as the locked room-trick is a cheeky clue that doubled as a red herring by diverting your attention away from the truth. A splendid locked room-trick that perhaps would have better at home in the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series, where it would have been more appreciated, but "The Case of the Modern Medusa" predates the first Dr. Hawthorne story, "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," by more than a year – published in the December, 1974, issue of EQMM. So, purely as an impossible crime story, this one comes highly recommended to every locked room reader.

The pool of suspects is practically bone dry and the murderer is pretty much the only person standing in it, but, since this is a how-was-it-done, not a whodunit, this is of no consequence. A well-hidden murderer would have certainly rocketed this story to the status of a modern classic, but I'm more than happy with what I got. And then there are the two detectives.

Admittedly, Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme aren't exactly three-dimensional characters, who appear to lean on the gimmick of being police-detectives without borders, but they pleasantly reminded me of Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong – creations of Dutch mystery writer "Anne van Doorn." A somewhat older, former policeman who mentors a younger woman and they're occasionally confronted with an impossible crime.

All in all, "The Case of the Modern Medusa" has a cleverly constructed locked room problem and would like to see more of Blue and Charme. So I'll definitely be returning to this series and, predicatively, I'm already eyeballing "The Case of the Musical Bullet" (1974).

The Laughing Cure: "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979) by Jon L. Breen

A week ago, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018), which is the last collection of short stories about a retired New England medico, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who begins every story with pouring a small libation before telling about one of the innumerable impossible crimes that plagued Northmont in the past – a small American town and locked room murder capital of the world. So with the publication of Challenge the Impossible there was nothing left to read in this series. Or is there?

Jon L. Breen is an award-winning mystery critic who took over The Jury Box column in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) from John Dickson Carr in 1977 and relinquished the column in 2011 to Steve Steinbock, but Breen is more than just a critic. Over the decades, Breen has penned over a 100 short stories and garnered a reputation as a "premier parody-pasticher" as he satirized his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries alike. Some of his parodies have been collected in Hair of the Sleuthhound (1982) and The Drowning Icecube and Other Stories (1999).

The Giant of the Short Story was not exempt from a friendly ribbing at the hands of Breen and in the November, 1979, issue of EQMM he aimed "the point of his pen at one of the favorite series characters in EQMM," Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

"The Problem of the Vanishing Town," subtitled "A Chapter from the Memoirs of Dr. Sid Shoehorn, New England General Practitioner," takes place in the small town of Northsouth. A quiet, peaceful place where nothing ever happens except the absolute impossible. An inebriated Dr. Shoehorn begins his tale with relating some of the unholy miracles that have taken place in Northsouth and they're gems.

One day, "the public library disappeared overnight," leaving behind a vacant lot, but the disappearance was "a publicity stunt on the part of the librarian," who are "a militant lot," to protest budget cuts – she put it back the next day. Obviously, this story takes place in the same universe as Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). A second incident that livened up a pleasantly dull Northsouth summer when an old man, Noah Zark, who claimed he was 2000 years old "challenged the Devil to a duel in the middle of the town square." But he was run through with "a pitchfork that came out of nowhere" in "full view of more than a hundred people." Why has nobody attempted to turn this premise into an actual story?

"The Problem of the Vanishing Town" takes place on a day in late August of 1928 and Dr. Shoehorn had delivered triplets that morning, attended to "a case of the black plague" and learned Sheriff Aperture got a telephone message saying that at three o'clock that afternoon "the whole town of Northsouth will disappear from the map." So they have to figure out how someone can make a whole town disappear.

I'm not sure whether, or not, "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" qualifies as an impossible crime story, because the plot only has a promise of an impossible situation. However, the explanation as to how the town of Northsouth eventually vanished, here played for laughs, could easily be used to explain the miraculous appearance of an entire town. So I decided to tag this post as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime," if only for being a parody of the Dr. Hawthorne series.

Since this is purely parody, there not much else I can say about "The Problem of the Vanishing Town," in terms of plotting or characterization, except that it's a fun, tongue-in-cheek treatment of one of Hoch's most popular and beloved series-characters. Crippen & Landru should have included it as a bonus story in Challenge the Impossible. Just like William Brittain's "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" in the posthumously published The Return of the Black Widowers (2005). So, long story short, "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" is unreservedly recommended to fans of Hoch and Dr. Hawthorne.

A note for the curious: one of the impossible murders Dr. Shoehorn casually described at the start of the story is the death of a clown, who was "mauled by a lion on the fifth floor of the Northsouth Hotel" when "the lion was in his cage five blocks away" – which was deemed "kind of interesting" by Dr. Shoehorn. Hoch picked up the challenge and turned this idea into a short story, entitled "Circus in the Sky," which was published in Scenes of Crime (2000). So I'll see if I can track down that story for one of my next short story reviews.

Next up on this blog is a review of a very obscure mystery novels from the 1930s that was reprinted last year.

Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch was "a legendary figure in the history of contemporary crime fiction," debuting in 1955 in Famous Detective Stories with "The Village of the Dead," who died in 2008 with "almost a thousand short stories" to his name and appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) from May, 1976 until his death – a literal Giant of the Short Detective Story. John Dickson Carr said of Hoch that "Satan himself would be proud of his ingenuity" and this may have something to do with his propensity for locked room and impossible crime fiction.

During his five decades as a writer, Hoch created "a village of unforgettable series characters," such as Simon Ark, Ben Snow and Nick Velvet, who have all come across one or two crimes of the impossible variety. Only one of his series-detectives exclusively dealt with locked room murders, impossible disappearances and other miraculous mysteries, Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

Dr. Hawthorne is a country physician in Northmont, a small, fictitious town in New England, during the first half of the twentieth century and the series follows the chronology of history. The series began in March, 1922 and ended two decades later in 1944. Ordinarily, long-running series and characters tend to get frozen in time, but here nobody is exempt from the ravages of time. Not even Dr. Hawthorne!

Last year, Crippen & Landru published Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018), which completed their collection of Dr. Hawthorne stories comprising of Diagnosis: Impossible (1996), More Things Impossible (2006), Nothing is Impossible (2014) and All But Impossible (2017). Five volumes packed with locked room and impossible crime stories! Sadly, this is the last time Dr. Hawthorne will pour the reader "a bit of libation" to go with his stories.

The stories collected in Challenge the Impossible take place during the Second World War, between 1940 and 1944, and the shadow of war looms ominously over the town of Northmont. And greatly impact the plots. So this volume had the added bonus of being one of those rare, WWII-themed collection of short stories. Let's see what's inside!

"The Problem of Annabel's Ark" was originally published in the March, 2000, issue of EQMM and introduces a new character, Annabel Lee Christie, who's a veterinarian with her own animal hospital "halfway between Northmont and Shinn Corners." Sabbath is a Siamese cat and the first patient of Annabel's Ark, but the poor animal has been strangled in its cage when the place was closed and locked up for the night. So she turns to "the local Sherlock Holmes," Dr. Sam Hawthorne, to help her expunge this blemish from her animal hospital.

A pretty decent opening story with an unusual, but good, impossible crime scenario with a perfectly acceptable explanation, which is only marred by the clumsy handling of the central clue – immediately giving away half of the locked room-trick. Still liked the story as a whole and love it Shinn Corners is only a short car drive from Northmont (see Ellery Queen's The Glass Village, 1954). It makes me wish there was a Dr. Hawthorne story in which he visited Theodore Roscoe's Four Corners.

EQMM, July, 2000

"The Problem of the Potting Shed" was originally published in the July, 2000, issue of EQMM and is possibly, plot-wise, one of the most perfect detective stories Hoch has written during his storied career. Sheriff Lens telephones Dr. Hawthorne to tell him he has something that's right up his alley: Douglas Oberman had been found "dead inside a locked potting shed," padlocked from the inside, with a bullet-wound in his right temple. Clues are liberally strewn across the pages that spell out the truth and I figured out "the how and the who and the why" exactly at the same time as Dr. Hawthorne. An original, rock solid impossible crime story with clever plot that inexplicably never turned up in any of the locked room anthologies from the past nineteen years.

"The Problem of the Yellow Wallpaper" comes from the March, 2001, issue of EQMM and is an homage to the Victorian-era Sensational novel. Dr. Hawthorne has a Dutchman as patient, Peter Haas, whose wife, Katherine, appears to have gone crazy and has to keep her locked in an attic room – a room with faded yellow wallpaper ripped away in places. Katherine has nightmares of "a prisoner in these walls," inside the wallpaper, "trying to claw her way out." Something quite the opposite happens when Katherine disappears from the attic room when she talking through the locked door with Dr. Hawthorne. And she left behind portrait of her own face staring out from her torn, wallpaper prison.

Admittedly, the scheme behind the plot is hardly original, especially the motive, but liked how the premise of a Victorian-era melodrama was used as a premise for a vanishing-act from a locked, barred and watched room with a very simple trick. So a fairly minor, but pleasant enough, short detective story.

"The Problem of the Haunted Hospital" was originally published in the August, 2001, issue of EQMM and begins when Dr. Hawthorne is consulted by Dr. Lincoln Jones on a patient of his, Sandra Bright, who claims her private, one-bed room in Pilgrim Memorial Hospital is haunted – swearing she saw "a hooded figure" outlined against "the moonlit window." On the following day, another patient is found smothered to death in the haunted hospital room where a year previously a wounded police suspect had been killed by a deputy during a botched escape.

So the reasons behind the ghostly presence and murder were pretty obvious, but they were nicely tied to the identity of the murderer and the vanishing-trick, which had a simple and elegant solution played to great effect. Another minor, but good, locked room story. This is story in which Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel get engaged.

"The Problem of the Traveler's Tale" was originally published in the June, 2002, issue of EQMM and brings a seasonal hiker, Graham Partridge, to Northmont with an interesting story for the police. Last year, Partridge had came across an abandoned, two-storied house boarded-up, but this year the house appeared to have people living in it. There was a middle-aged couple and he recognized the man as Clifford Fascox, "a Chicago swindler," who had worked "a Ponzi scheme on thousands of small investors," but after posting bail he disappeared along with five million dollars – everyone assumed he had fled the country. Two years later, he appears to have turned up in a secluded, out-of-the-way house.

Dr. Hawthorne accompanies Sheriff Lens to the house, but they find it locked up tight and through one of the windows they spot a body sprawled on a carpet. What they find inside looks like a murder-suicide had it not been for the absence of scorch-marks around the bullet-wound in Fascox's right temple. Unfortunately, the solution to the locked house is an old one, but the reason why the murderer had to take a stupendous risk was a clever touch to an otherwise average detective story.

EQMM, December, 2002

"The Problem of Bailey's Buzzard" originally appeared in the December, 2002, issue of EQMM and the story begins on the day before infamy, December 6, 1941, when Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel Christie exchanged their wedding vows. There was much kidding about the wedding day being "interrupted by a locked-room murder," but it was a party without any bloodletting and the following day they began to pack when the news broke “Japanese planes were attacking Pearl Harbor” in Hawaii! The nation was at war. And they have to postpone their honeymoon in Washington.

So they get invited by a friend, Bernice Rosen, to come to her horse farm and this drops two problems in Dr. Hawthorne's lap. One is a historical mystery pertaining to the missing remains of a Civil War hero, General Moore, whose casket held "the remains of a very large bird" and the murder of Bernice – who appears to have been snatched from her horse surrounded by snow only marked by hoof prints. As if she had been picked up by a large bird of prey. I very much enjoyed the historical sub-plot, but the idea behind the impossibility has been used before and much better by John Dickson Carr and Baynard Kendrick.

"The Problem of the Interrupted Séance" was originally published in the September/October, 2003, issue of EQMM and the murder in this story is a direct consequence of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the boys of Northmont, Ronald Hale, had aboard "the ill-fated battleship Arizona" and his mother, Kate, is a patient of Dr. Hawthorne and this is how he learns she's has fallen in the hands of a spiritual medium, Sandra Gleam. Dr. Hawthorne warns her mediums are known to prey on the grieving, but Gleam has convinced her to conduct a private séance at her home together with her husband, Art. Dr. Hawthorne and Sheriff Lens are present as outside observers, who stand outside of the room, but, when the door is opened, they find the Hales unconscious and Gleam with her throat slit. There's no weapon found inside the room.

This is a pretty decent story, as far as these "debunked séances" goes, but not anywhere near as good as Clayton Rawson's classic "From Another World" (collected in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, 1979).

"The Problem of the Candidate's Cabin" was originally published in the December, 2004, issue of EQMM and has an interesting backdrop, but plot-wise, easily the weakest, most disappointing and unimpressive story of this collection. Sheriff Lens is running for his seventh and final term in office, which he usually does unopposed, but this time the election is heating up as a young candidate, Ray Anders, is vying for his spot – calling for younger men and new blood in the county sheriff's department. The election is thrown in disarray when the campaign manager of Anders is murdered and Sheriff Lens is the only person who could have pulled the trigger.

A story that began strong, but the plot was mediocre and didn't care at all about the lame locked room-trick.

The following story is "The Problem of the Black Cloister" and have read the story before in Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Murders (2006), but disliked the story and didn't want to reread it. So moving on.

EQMM, July, 2005

Fortunately, "The Problem of the Secret Passage," originally published in the July, 2005, issue of EQMM was incredibly fun to read with an inventive and imaginative locked room setup. Meg Woolitzer is the editor of the Northmonth Advertizer, a weekly newspaper, who wants to organize a scrap-metal drive to support the war effort. She wants to run a weekly feature with someone dressed like Sherlock Holmes, complete with deerstalker, cape and magnifying glass, who goes around town looking for scrap metal to be donated to the war effort and he even has a great moniker – namely Unlock Homes! Absolutely brilliant! Dr. Hawthorne's reputation as an amateur detective and even his initials makes him "a perfect scrap-metal Sherlock." So he reluctantly accepts the role on behalf of Uncle Sam and the men fighting over seas.

Meg Woolitzer has arranged their first photo-shoot in the home of the elderly Aaron Cartwright, who has a barn-house full of junk, but offers them to show them his secret passage. One of the bookcases in the library is a hidden door, opening on a dark staircase, leading to "a plain metal door" without knob that can only be opened from the other side with a combination-lock and only Cartwright knows the combination. Well, the following day Cartwright is murdered in the library and the door was bolted from the inside, while the metal door in the secret passage was securely closed. So how did the murderer enter and leave this hermetically sealed room? Hoch has found the best use for a secret passage in an impossible crime story and has a simple, but elegant, solution to the confounding locked room situation. So, yeah, I enjoyed this one.

The following story is "The Problem of the Devil's Orchard," but have already reviewed it separately here.

"The Problem of the Shepherd's Ring" was originally published in the September/October, 2006, issue of EQMM and has a plot that reminded me strongly of Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999). Julias Finesaw broke his leg when his tractor rolled over and has been ranting and raving from his sickbed how he's going "to kill Ralph Cedric for selling him that defective tractor," saying nobody can't stop him, because "he can make himself invisible" and "walk down the road" to kill Cedric – or so he says. Apparently, Finesaw made good on his promise and all of the evidence indicates he has killed Cedric, but this is a physical impossibility.

A good, imaginative detective story ending with the news that Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel are expecting a child.

"The Problem of Suicide Cottage" was first printed in the July, 2007, issue of EQMM and the Hawthornes decided to wait out the final month of Annabel's pregnancy at a cottage on Chesterlake. Unfortunately, their cottage has an history of suicides and not long after their arrival a woman appears to have hung herself in their cottage, which was locked up at the time, but this locked room-trick was disappointingly simple. Something that only served to give the story an exciting climax. The only notable point about this story is that it revealed this series is narrated by an eighty-year-old Dr. Sam Hawthorne in the 1970s and the identity of his listener.

EQMM, November, 2007

"The Problem of the Summer Snowman" originally appeared in the November, 2007, issue of EQMM and had an unexpectedly dark back-story and motive, which strikes an unnerving note with the problem of a snowman that was seen entering a house right before a children's birthday body – leaving behind a puddle of water and a dead body inside a locked house. A routine, time-worn explanation is given to the problem of the locked house, but the answer to the snowman was genuinely clever. So not a perfect story, but certainly a memorable one. Particularly in this series.

Finally, "The Problem of the Secret Patient," originally published in the May, 2008, issue of EQMM and shares the same strength and weaknesses as the previous story. A weak story with a memorable elements dabbling in alternative history. Dr. Hawthorne is visited by Special Agent Barnovich, of the FBI, who tells him Pilgrim Memorial Hospital has been chosen to bring in a secret patient, whose head had been bandaged to conceal his identity, to have a medical checkup. Presumably, the patient is a well-known, high-ranking defector from Germany and rumor has it he's being fixed up to meet President Roosevelt. However, the patient is poisoned under seemingly impossible circumstances before he can be moved again. Sadly, the murderer was rather obvious and the poisoning method is another golden oldie, but the identity of the secret patient gives this series the sendoff it deserves. No. It's not Hitler.

Quality-wise, Challenge the Impossible is an above average collection of short stories with mostly good stories ("Haunted Hospital," "Traveler's Tale" and "Secret Passage"), one classic locked room story ("Potting Shed") and only a few I disliked ("Candidate's Cabin" and "Black Cloister"). So not a bad score at all and comes warmly recommended to locked room enthusiasts, readers of historical detective stories and long-time fans of Hoch.

I'm afraid my next read is going to be another contemporary impossible crime novel, which came recommended by JJ. So stay tuned.