Edward D. Hoch

• Born: February 22, 1930
• Birthplace: Rochester, New York
• Died: January 17, 2008
• Place of death: Rochester, New York

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage; police procedural; private investigator

Principal Series: Simon Ark, 1955-; Captain Leopold, 1962-; C. Jeffrey Rand, 1965-; Nick Velvet, 1966-; Carl Crader and Earl Jazine, 1969-; Matthew Prize, 1984-

Contribution

Edward D. Hoch was the most important post-World War II writer of mystery and detective short stories. In recent years, because of the disappearance of many short-story markets—whether pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective or slick publications such as Collier’s and American Magazine and their British equivalents—most mystery writers have concentrated on novels. Hoch, however, was a professional short-story writer, with more than 750 stories to his credit. For more than fifteen years his stories appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and it is a rare anthology that does not include at least one of his tales. Within the limits of the short story Hoch was versatile, trying almost every form and approach, but most of his stories emphasize fair-play clueing and detection. Many of his plot elements are innovative, including combining detection with science fiction and fantasy, but he shares with the Golden Age writers of the 1920’s and the 1930’s the belief that the puzzle is the fundamental element of the detective story.

Biography

Edward Dentinger Hoch was born on February 22, 1930, in Rochester, New York, the son of Earl G. Hoch and Alice Dentinger Hoch. He tried his hand at writing detective stories during high school and during his two years (1947-1949) at the University of Rochester. (Later, he revised a tale done for a college composition class, and it was published as “The Chippy” in 1956.) He worked for the Rochester Public Library as a researcher from 1949 until November, 1950, when he received his draft notice. He quickly enlisted in the United States Army and spent the next two years stationed at various forts, serving as a member of the military police in 1950 and 1951. While in the army, he continued to write short stories. He received an honorable mention for a story plot he submitted to a cover contest run by The Mysterious Traveler Magazine in 1952, but he could not break into print.

After leaving the army, Hoch looked for a job in the writing or editorial side of a publishing house, eventually landing a position working on “adjustments” for Pocket Books in New York City. Instead of doing creative work, however, he spent his time checking on the accuracy of shipments and accounts. After a year of that, and a raise of only three dollars a week, he returned to Rochester in January, 1954, where he landed work in copywriting and public relations at the Hutchins Advertising Company. He married Patricia McMahon on June 5, 1957.

While still working in advertising, Hoch began to find publishers for his stories. The first to appear in print was “The Village of the Dead,” published in the December, 1955, issue of Famous Detective, one of the last of the pulp magazines. It features a psychic sleuth, Simon Ark, the first of Hoch’s many series detectives. Twenty-two of his stories were published during 1956 and 1957. In 1968, having won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “The Oblong Room” and with a contract for the novel that would become The Shattered Raven (1969), Hoch decided to devote himself full time to writing.

Hoch became even more prolific as a short-story writer—publishing a story in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from 1973 to 1981. He also became one of the best-known anthology editors in the field, choosing the stories for the annual Best Detective Stories of the Year and its successor, The Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories. Under the pseudonym R. E. Porter, he wrote a column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and in 1982 served as president of the Mystery Writers of America. That year he also honored Rochester Public Library, his first employer, by joining its board of trustees. In 1998 Hoch received an Anthony Award for his short story “One Bag of Coconuts.” In 1999 he received the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer Award and, in 2000, The Eye, granted by the Private Eye Writers of America—both for lifetime achievement. In 2001, he received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award and an Anthony Award for “The Problem of the Potting Shed” from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. In 2005 Hoch received a Barry Award for “The War in Wonderland.” Hoch died at the age of 77 on January 17, 2008 at his home in Rochester, New York.

Analysis

Edward D. Hoch wrote short stories because he was interested in ideas rather than elaboration of plot or character. “Though I can write a short story in a week or two,” he explained, “a novel takes me two or three months. With the few I’ve attempted, I find myself losing interest about halfway through, anxious to get on to the next idea.” Three of his novels, however, are quite accomplished. The Shattered Raven, which takes place at the Mystery Writers of America’s annual meeting, maintains the puzzlement throughout and gives a good account of what the publisher called with notable hyperbole “the glamorous world of the great mystery fictioneers.”

The Transvection Machine

His second novel, The Transvection Machine (1971), is a cross-genre work—something very difficult to market successfully because booksellers dislike having to decide where to shelve a book. In The Transvection Machine, a detective novel that takes place in the twenty-first century, the puzzle is well handled, and Hoch carefully leads readers to be sympathetic both with sleuths Carl Crader and Earl Jazine, the Computer Cops, and with the rebels who oppose their computerized society.

The Blue Movie Murders

The Blue Movie Murders (1972) is less daring, but it is a well-written, fairly clued, fast-paced novel with a well-masked least-likely murderer. It is one of many paperback originals that were published under the name Ellery Queen, but were in fact contracted out to various authors. Manfred B. Lee, who with his cousin, Frederic Dannay, had written novels and short stories as Ellery Queen, authorized the use of the Queen name on paperbacks. Lee would approve a plot outline submitted by an author hired by his agents and then edit the final typescript. The Blue Movie Murders is the final paperback original to use the Queen name, for Lee died only a few hours after accepting Hoch’s outline. Dannay did the final editing. It is part of the Trouble Shooter series that was begun by other writers, and it featured Mike McCall, “Assistant to the Governor for Special Affairs.” The series emphasized modern issues, and Hoch dealt sensitively with people involved in the pornographic film industry.

Hoch’s other novels, however, do not work so well. The Fellowship of the Hand (1973) and The Frankenstein Factory (1975), both of which continue the Computer Cops’ investigations, lose narrative drive about halfway through.

The Matthew Prize Series

In 1984 and 1985, Hoch supplied the plot for three contest novels that were produced in response to the popularity of Thomas Chastain’s Who Killed the Robins Family? And Where and When and How Did They Die? (1983). Each ends just as the detective announces that he or she has solved the crime. Reader could submit their own solutions to the publisher, along with fifty cents, and the winner received fifteen thousand dollars. (The third book, which was published only in Great Britain, had a much smaller prize of one thousand pounds.) Prize Meets Murder (1984), the first in the series, was misleadingly attributed to R. T. Edwards with Otto Penzler—Penzler, whose name is included on all three contest books did none of the writing, though he did market the series. R. T. Edwards was in fact Edward D. Hoch, who devised the plot, and Ron Goulart, who wrote the text. The result is an entertaining, though forgettable, book, which moves along swiftly until the frustrating nonconclusion. (The frustration continued when readers sent to the publisher for the solution, which was not written up as a dramatic final chapter but rather as a list of clues and their interpretation.) Hoch’s collaborator on the two later contest novels, Medical Center Murders (1984) by Lisa Drake and This Prize Is Dangerous (1985) by Matthew Prize, has not been revealed. Neither book sold as well as the first in the series.

The Short Stories

Yet however one evaluates Hoch’s novels, his major contributions to the mystery and detective genre are his short stories. He created more than twenty series characters; only those who have appeared in Hoch’s books are listed at the beginning of this article. Others include investigators for Interpol (Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme), a Gypsy (Michael Vlado), a police officer (Nancy Trentino), a priest (Father David Noone), a female bodyguard (Libby Knowles), a New England physician (Dr. Sam Hawthorne), a con man (Ulysses S. Bird), and a Western gunslinger (Ben Snow). His sleuths specialize in different sorts of cases: hard-boiled investigations (Al Darlan), occult crimes (Professor Dark), espionage (Harry Ponder and Charles Spacer), and school crimes (Paul Tower, the Lollypop Cop).

Despite their great variety in plot and detective, most of Hoch’s stories have certain elements that make their authorship immediately recognizable. His writing style has been called “deceptively simple,” in that the manner of telling never interferes with what was to Hoch the primary emphasis of a short work of fiction—the tale itself. Hoch did not want the narrative style to make the reader aware of the writer’s personality, and thus he seldom included unusual words, extended metaphors, or obscure examples based on his wide reading. Except for some of his earliest apprentice stories, he did not emphasize atmosphere for its own sake; nor did he load the text with action-filled but ultimately meaningless adjectives in the manner of many of the earlier pulp writers.

Hoch’s wording is economical and precise. Witness the opening of his “The People of the Peacock”: “The man who called himself Tony Wilder had traveled three days by camel to reach the valley oasis not far from where the Euphrates River crossed the arid border between Syria and Iraq.” In a single sentence, the reader is introduced to a character, a setting, and the beginning of a situation. With the phrase “who called himself,” Hoch already suggests the mystery, and the story will indeed revolve around a question of identity. In the middle of the story, Hoch leads the reader to think that the problem is to identify a spy named Venice, when in fact he has already hinted that the puzzle involves Wilder. To take another example, “Murder of a Gypsy King” begins, “On the long, lonely highway into Bucharest that sunny August afternoon, Jennifer Beatty suddenly changed her mind.” Again, Hoch tells the reader who, when, where, and suggests a mystery.

Hoch often used the first sentence in a story to make the reader ask “why.” Sometimes, as in “Captain Leopold and the Murderer’s Son,” the story begins simply: “Leopold would always remember it as the case he didn’t solve.” At other times—for example, in “In Some Secret Place”—the unadorned language of the opening is surprisingly full of nuances: “I was almost too young to remember it, and certainly too young to understand it all, but that July weekend of Uncle Ben’s funeral has stayed with me through all these years.” The reader realizes that the story occurred years ago, when the narrator was young and when a “July weekend” implied long, lazy summer days. The sentence also suggests questions: What happened so long ago that the narrator was “almost too young” to recall and definitely “too young to understand”? Whatever it was had something to do with a funeral and therefore death, and the events were so important that they have “stayed with me through all these years.” Few other authors could have said so much, so succinctly, and led readers to want to know more.

Though accepting the modern dictum that one’s language should be simple and direct, Hoch in his plotting was a neo-Romantic. Rarely were his stories based on the naturalistic analysis of what has gone wrong with society; instead, the major plot element usually involved the bizarre and the exotic. In this respect, he was a descendant of the first writer of detective novels, Wilkie Collins, whose mysteries featured a seemingly murderous room, a jewel stolen from the head of an Asian idol, and the apparently ghostly manifestations of a young woman dressed in white. In short, ordinary events did not hold much interest for Hoch or for his protagonists. The idea behind the Nick Velvet stories was to explain why anyone would pay Velvet twenty thousand dollars or more to steal worthless items, and Hoch finds all sorts of unexpected things for Velvet to take: the water from a swimming pool, a baseball team, all the tickets to a play, a birthday cake, a penny, a merry-go-round horse, a matador’s cape, among other things. On one occasion, he is hired to steal the contents of an empty room; on another he goes after a lake monster.

Hoch’s Sleuths and Spys

Simon Ark, Hoch’s first detective, investigates a witch living on Park Avenue, the death of a woman whose body bursts into flames, a religious cult whose followers attach themselves to crosses, a bullet that kills a person centuries after it was fired, a modern unicorn, a living mermaid, a mummy that washes ashore in Brazil, and a man who is murdered while alone in a revolving door. Sam Hawthorne, a New England country doctor of the 1920’s and the 1930’s, specializes in impossible crimes. In his first case, he discovers how a carriage disappeared from within a covered bridge, and in later adventures he explains how a boy vanished from an ordinary swing in full view and solves many locked-room murders. Indeed, by the 1970’s, Hoch had staked out a position as the successor to John Dickson Carr in mastery of so-called miracle crimes—murders, robberies, and disappearances that seem to have no rational explanation but that, at the conclusion of the story, are shown to have been committed by humans for human motives and by natural means. One of Hoch’s most extraordinary plots, for example, involves a man who leaps from a window and then disappears until hours later, when his body hits the pavement. Even Captain Leopold, hero of Hoch’s series of police procedurals, cannot avoid bizarre cases. When a child disappears from a Ferris-wheel car, and when an automobile is driven by a dead man, Leopold investigates. In one story, he is the sole suspect in the locked-room murder of his former wife, and in another he combats a supercriminal reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty.

Hoch’s espionage agents are also experts at unusual crimes. Harry Ponder is faced with the problem of the ambassador who is shot within a locked automobile. Jeffrey Rand, who supposedly handles only decoding messages—certainly a safe, perhaps even a dull occupation—has to unravel mysteries involving a spy who has committed suicide while holding a playing card in his hand, a woman who travels on airplanes with a coffin, and an unidentified British agent who has suddenly started sending coded messages.

No matter whether they begin as thieves, cryptanalysts, gunfighters, or Gypsy chiefs, Hoch’s protagonists almost always become detectives. As Hoch explains about Nick Velvet, “he is often called upon to solve a mystery in order to accomplish his mission or clear himself.” Most of Hoch’s stories are fair-play puzzles; he challenges the reader to foresee the solution before the detective explains. Frequently there is enough mystery in a single Hoch short story to fill a novel. Each of these mysteries is completely clued, and each resolved in a story of about sixty-five hundred words. Hoch was so prolific and so versatile that exceptions can be found to every generalization about his work, except one: His plots are always ingenious.

Principal Series Characters:

• Simon Ark , who may be two thousand years old, is based on the legend of the Wandering Jew. He is tall, heavyset, “with an expression that was at times saintly.” He spends his life seeking evil, and consequently he investigates crimes that seem to involve black magic and other occult phenomena.
• Captain Jules Leopold is head of the homicide department in a large Connecticut city called Monroe. Though born in 1921, Leopold ceases aging toward the middle of the series. In the early stories, he is a widower and something of a loner; later he remarries.
• C. Jeffrey Rand is a British secret service agent. He is slender and handsome, with brown hair. In his first cases, he is a cryptanalyst and head of the Department of Concealed Communications. After he retires, he is frequently called back to resolve espionage problems. Rand was born in 1926 but like most of Hoch’s series characters he stops aging.
• Nick Velvet is a professional thief who steals only things that seem to be valueless, charging his clients twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars for the service. Born Nicholas Velvetta in 1932 in Greenwich Village, he reaches perpetual middle age after about thirty stories in the series. He is just taller than six feet, with dark hair and slightly Italian features.
• Carl Crader is a “Computer Cop,” an investigator for the twenty-first century Computer Investigation Bureau. He and his assistant,
• Earl Jazine , are in charge of cases that involve tampering with the computers that run almost everything in their science-fictional world.
• Matthew Prize , who was a licensed private eye for almost six years in Los Angeles, has become “Associate Professor of Criminology at Cal State, San Amaro Campus.” He reads Ross Macdonald’s novels and feels “very guilty for being kind of a smartass myself.”

Bibliography

Adey, Robert. Locked Room Murders. 2d ed. Minneapolis: Crossover Press, 1991. Adey analyzes eighty-one of Hoch’s impossible crime stories. Each entry has a brief description of the impossible problem (usually, but not limited to, a locked-room murder) presented and, in an appendix at the end of the book, how the crime was solved.

Barzun, Jacques, Taylor Hertig, and Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. 2d ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. The authors single out eleven short stories and one anthology for discussion. They emphasize the consistency of Hoch’s work and praise the complexity and lifelike quality of his plots.

Hoch, Edward D. “Shortcut to Murder: An Interview with Edward D. Hoch.” Interview by John Kovaleski. The Armchair Detective 23 (Spring, 1990): 152-169. Considered the definitive interview with the author, it contains detailed descriptions of many aspects of his career, including his early writing, his writing habits and methods, and the origin of his major series characters. Hoch frankly discusses the reasons for his preference for the short story over the novel.

Kovaleski, John. “Shortcut to Murder.” Armchair Detective 23 (Spring, 1990): 152-169. An interview with Hoch, who talks about his detective fiction and its relationship to the rest of his work.

McAleer, John, and Andrew McAleer. Mystery Writing in a Nutshell. Rockville, Md.: James A. Rock, 2007. This how-to volume on mystery writing contains a foreword by Hoch that reveals much about his views on writing.

Moffatt, June M., and Francis M. Nevins, Jr. Edward Hoch Bibliography, 1955-1991. Van Nuys, Calif.: Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, 1991. A complete listing of the writings of Hoch through the end of 1991, with complete publishing information, including reprints, identification of those stories about continuing characters, and adaptations to other media.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. Introduction to Leopold’s Way. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Nevins discusses the series character Captain Leopold in the context of Hoch’s many other series characters. He considers the stories among Hoch’s best because they are classic detective tales but, in the tradition of crime fiction by Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, they reveal “unexpected nuances of character and emotion and meaning beneath the surface of his deceptively simple style.”

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by Lesley Henderson. 4th ed. London: St. James Press, 1998. In addition to brief biographical information and an extensive bibliography of Hoch’s work, this volume contains an analysis of Hoch’s work and place in the genre. Nevins finds the Roman Catholic viewpoint of the early Hoch obtrusive but notes the writer’s growth and the stimulating concepts behind many of his plots. Hoch’s stories are described as perfect miniatures of the novels of such detective-story giants as Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.

Nolan, Tom. “Short Stories, Hard Covers: New Partners in Crime Fiction.” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2007, p. D.10. In this article about the increasing popularity of short stories, Hoch notes that he has published 938 short stories in fifty-two years and is a regular contribution to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Skillman, Brad. “Edward Hoch: Master in His Own Write.” The Drood Review of Mystery 11 (October, 1991): 4-5. Largely based on an interview with Hoch, this article elicited his opinion on the reasons for the relative decline of the mystery short story, including the shrinkage of magazine markets for new writers. Hoch also discusses the continuing trend, begun at the end of World War II, toward the psychological crime story and away from the detective tale.

Spoto, Mary Theresa. “Needing Burial: Horror and Reconciliation in Edward D. Hoch’s ’The Faceless Thing.’” Studies in Weird Fiction 20 (Winter, 1997): 13-17. A close reading of Hoch’s short horror story “The Faceless Thing,” which Spoto praises for an ending different from traditional horror story endings that reestablish the natural order. Instead, Hoch offers an alternative type of reconciliation that is consistent with the psychology of its characters and provides a closure “that is in harmony with the disharmony of a universe of horror.”

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. This early, unsigned article gives a general overview of Hoch’s work and refers to his short stories as highly regarded, though his novels had been greeted indifferently.