Night My Friend Read online

  The Night My Friend

  Stories of Crime and Suspense

  Edward D. Hoch

  Edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

  Contents

  Introduction (by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.)

  Twilight Thunder

  The Night My Friend

  The Suitcase

  The Picnic People

  Day for a Picnic

  Shattered Rainbow

  The Patient Waiter

  Too Long at the Fair

  Winter Run

  The Long Way Down

  Dreaming Is a Lonely Thing

  In Some Secret Place

  To Slay an Eagle

  They Never Come Back

  The Only Girl in His Life

  It Happens, Sometimes

  A Girl Like Cathy

  What’s It All About?

  First Offense

  Hawk in the Valley

  The Ring with the Velvet Ropes

  Homecoming

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  IF EVER THERE WAS a member of an endangered species it’s Edward D. Hoch, the only person alive who makes his living writing mystery short stories. To date he has sold almost seven hundred tales, and at his current rate of productivity he should hit the thousand mark in the early 2000s. As if turning out two to three dozen stories a year were not enough, he fills his odd moments with writing a regular column for The Armchair Detective, editing the annual Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories anthologies, and serving tirelessly on various committees of the Mystery Writers of America organization. He’s written five novels, plotted a series of mystery-puzzle paperbacks, and is presently working on a book-length whodunit in collaboration with other members of MWA. Not exactly the lightest of work-loads; and yet he never seems harried or overcommitted and comes across in person and correspondence as an amazingly placid and easy-going fellow. His secret? If you are doing precisely what you want to do with your life, and making it pay besides, the distinction between work and play becomes meaningless and every hour is a pleasure.

  Edward Dentinger Hoch was a Washington’s Birthday boy, born in Rochester, New York on February 22, 1930. His father, Earl G. Hoch, was a banker, but despite the precarious nature of that line of work during the Depression, the family weathered the thirties without serious problems.

  From a very early age Ed was fascinated by mystery fiction. “When I was a young child,” he said, “I used to draw cartoon strips and have masked villains running around. They were terrible, just stick figures, because I wasn’t much of an artist, but I’d try to draw in cloaks and masks to identify the villains so I could have a final unmasking to surprise the reader. Of course, I was the only reader. No one else saw those strips.”

  In June of 1939, when the sixty-minute Adventures of Ellery Queen series debuted on the CBS radio network, nine-year-old Ed Hoch was one of its staunchest fans. Later that year, when Pocket Books, Inc. launched its first 25¢ paperback reprint books, the boy discovered that his hero Ellery Queen had been the protagonist of many novels as well as a radio sleuth. The first adult book he ever read was the Pocket Books edition of Queen’s 1934 classic The Chinese Orange Mystery. “It was among the first group of paperbacks published, and I recall going down to the corner drugstore and seeing them all lined up with their laminated covers. I debated for some time between James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and an Agatha Christie title [probably The Murder of Roger Ackroyd], and finally settled on Ellery Queen because I had heard the Ellery Queen radio program which was so popular in those days. I bought The Chinese Orange Mystery and was completely fascinated by it, sought out all the other Ellery Queen novels I could find in paperback, as Pocket Books published them over the next few years, and from there went on to read other things. I read Sherlock Holmes at about that time too.”

  It was during the forties that, one by one, Ed Hoch discovered the masters of fair-play detection: Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and of course the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee who wrote as Ellery Queen. In 1947, after completing high school, he entered the University of Rochester, but left two years later to take a researcher’s job at the local public library. He enlisted in 1950, during the Korean conflict, and once out of basic training he was assigned to Fort Jay, on Governor’s Island just off Manhattan, as a military policeman. He took advantage of being stationed near the headquarters of Mystery Writers of America, which was then only five or six years old, to attend the organization’s monthly meetings (in uniform) and to mingle with the giants of deductive puzzlement whose books he’d been hooked on since age nine. Discharged from the service in 1952, he went to work in the adjustments department of Pocket Books, the house that had started him reading detective fiction, and continued to write short mysteries as he had since high school. In 1954, back in Rochester, he took a copywriter’s job with the Hutchins advertising agency, and late the following year he knew the special pleasure of seeing his first published story on the newsstands. That was the start of Ed Hoch’s real career, one that is still going strong thirty-six years and almost seven hundred stories later.

  For more than a dozen years after that first sale, he kept his job at the ad agency and saved his fiction writing for evenings, weekends, and vacations. But he was so fertile with story ideas and such a swift writer that editors and readers could easily have mistaken him for a full-timer even in those early years. In 1957 he married Patricia McMahon, with whom he still shares a small neat house in suburban Rochester. (Two of its three bedrooms were long ago converted into his office space, and the basement into a library filled with thousands of mystery novels, short story collections and magazine issues, few of them without at least one Hoch story.) The field’s top publications, Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery magazines, began printing his tales in 1962. Six years later, having won the coveted Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for the best short story of 1967, he decided that he could support the family on his writing income and left the advertising agency. He continues to write full-time (many would say more than full-time) today. During 1982–83 he served as president of the organization to whose annual dinners he had first come in military khaki more than thirty years earlier. At age sixty-one he shows no signs of slowing down, and readers around the world hope he’ll stay active well beyond his thousandth story.

  Why so few novels and so many short stories? It boils down to Hoch’s special affinity for the short form. “Writing a novel has always been, to me, a task to be finished as quickly as possible. Writing a short story is a pleasure one can linger over, with delight in the concept and surprise at the finished product.” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “I guess ideas just come easily to me. That’s why I’ve always been more attracted to the short story form than the novel. I am more interested in the basic plotting than in the development of various sub-plots. And I think the basic plot, or gimmick—the type of twist you have in detective stories—is the thing I can do best, which explains why so many of my stories tend to be formal detective stories rather than the crime-suspense tales that so many writers are switching to today.”

  Those words are misleading in one sense: more than two hundred of his published stories are non-series tales of crime and suspense, and some of the best of them are collected here. But most of his energies have gone into the creation of short-story series characters and the chronicling of their exploits. To date he has launched twenty-four separate series, dealing with all sorts of protagonists from an occult detective who claims to be more than two thousand years old to a Western drifter who may be a reincarnation of Billy the Kid to a science-fictional Computer Investigation Bureau. Whatever the concept of a series, whatever its roots, Hoch’s tendency
is to turn it into a series of miniature detective novels, complete with bizarre crimes, subtle clues, brilliant deductions and of course the ethos of playing fair with the reader that distinguishes the work of Carr, Christie, and Queen. The best introduction to the world of Ed Hoch is a quick tour through each of his series in the order in which they were created.

  SIMON ARK, the two-millennia-old Satan-hunter, was the central character in Hoch’s first published story, “Village of the Dead” (Famous Detective Stories, December 1955), and appeared in many tales that editor Robert A. W. Lowndes bought for the Columbia chain of pulp magazines during the late fifties. The ideas in these apprentice stories are occasionally quite original (e.g. the murder of one of a sect of Penitentes while the cult members are hanging on crucifixes in a dark cellar), but the execution tends at times to be crude and naive and the Roman Catholic viewpoint somewhat obtrusive. Eight of the early Arks were collected in two rare paperback volumes, The Judges of Hades and City of Brass, both published by Leisure Books in 1971, but the most readily accessible book about this character is The Quests of Simon Ark (Mysterious Press, 1984). In the late 1970s Simon was resurrected for new cases in the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines, but these tales pare down the occult aspects to a bare minimum and present Ark simply as an eccentric old mastersleuth specializing in impossible crimes.

  PROFESSOR DARK, apparently an alter ego of Simon Ark, popped up in two obscure pulp magazine stories of the mid-fifties under Hoch’s pseudonym of Stephen Dentinger, but they have never been reprinted and are of interest only to completists.

  AL DIAMOND, a private eye character, began life in “Jealous Lover” (Crime and Justice, March 1957), which featured a walk-on part by a Captain Leopold, later to become Hoch’s most frequently recurring series detective. After two appearances, Diamond’s name was changed to AL DARLAN so as to avoid confusion with Blake Edwards’ radio and TV private eye Richard Diamond. Although little known and rarely reprinted, Hoch’s best Darlan tales, such as “Where There’s Smoke” (Manhunt, March 1964), are beautiful examples of fair-play detection within the PI framework.

  BEN SNOW, the Westerner who may be Billy the Kid redux, was created by Hoch for editor Hans Stefan Santesson, who ran Ben’s adventures in The Saint Mystery Magazine beginning in 1961. Perhaps the best of the early Snows is “The Ripper of Storyville” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1963), a first-rate Western whodunit. With “The Vanished Steamboat” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1984) Hoch launched a new series of frontier puzzles for Ben to solve.

  CAPTAIN LEOPOLD, the Maigret of a northeastern city not too different from Hoch’s native Rochester, has been the protagonist of close to ninety stories beginning with “Circus” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, January 1962). In the best of them, collected in Leopold’s Way (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), Hoch fuses the detective gamesmanship stuff of the Ellery Queen tradition with elements derived from Graham Greene and Georges Simenon, burying unexpected nuances of character and emotion beneath the surface of his deceptively simple style.

  FATHER DAVID NOONE, parish priest and occasional detective, began life in 1964 as Hoch’s version of a clerical sleuth in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. He was dropped after two rather feeble cases but came back to play a major role in “The Sweating Statue” (in Detectives A to Z, ed. Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, 1985), which Hoch considers his best Noone story.

  RAND, of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications, was created in 1964 for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and has since appeared in more than sixty episodes of espionage laced with cryptography and detection. Originally called Randolph, he was renamed because EQMM editor Fred Dannay wanted a name subliminally evoking James Bond even though there was nothing Bond-like about the stories. The series began with “The Spy Who Did Nothing” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1965), and most of the Rands retain “The Spy Who” in their titles, reminding us that the greatest espionage novel of the era in which Rand came to life was John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Rand is now officially in retirement but Hoch still brings him back for an EQMM assignment once or twice a year. Seven of his early cases are collected in the paperback volume The Spy and the Thief (Davis Publications, 1971).

  NICK VELVET is perhaps the best-known Hoch character, a thief who steals only objects of no value and who is usually forced to play detective in the course of his thieving. He debuted in “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1966) and quickly became an international hit. More than sixty short Velvets have been published over the past quarter century. Seven of Nick’s early capers are included in The Spy and the Thief and a total of fourteen (of which two come from the earlier volume) are collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, 1978). Several books of Velvet stories have been published in Japan and, rechristened Nick Verlaine, our contemporary Raffles has been the star of a French TV mini-series. The character has been under option by 20th Century-Fox for several years and may yet make it to prime time in America.

  HARRY PONDER, a short-lived spy-cum-sleuth whose name suggests the Len Deighton-Michael Caine movie spy Harry Palmer, first appeared in “The Magic Bullet” (Argosy, January 1969), an excellent mix of espionage and impossible-crime detection, but was dropped after one more case.

  BARNEY HAMET, a New York mystery writer, turned amateur sleuth in Hoch’s first novel, The Shattered Raven (Lancer, 1969), and helped untangle a murder at the Mystery Writers of America annual dinner. In the short story “Murder at the Bouchercon” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1983), Hamet probes another killing among his colleagues and joins the roster of Hoch series characters.

  CARL CRADER and EARL JAZINE, who solve crimes for the Federal Computer Investigation Bureau in the early 21st century, were created by Hoch in “Computer Cops,” a story he wrote for Hans Stefan Santesson’s science fiction-mystery anthology Crime Prevention in the 30th Century (Walker, 1969). Later Hoch starred them in his trilogy of futuristic detective novels: The Transvection Machine (Walker, 1971), The Fellowship of the Hand (Walker, 1972), and The Frankenstein Factory (Warner Paperback Library, 1975). They haven’t been seen since.

  DAVID PIPER, director of the Department of Apprehension and also known as The Manhunter, shows that even when Hoch creates a character with a superficial resemblance to The Executioner, The Butcher, and similar macho action heroes, he converts the man into a mainstream detective. Piper starred in a six-installment serial, “The Will-o’-the-Wisp Mystery,” published in EQMM between April and September of 1971 under the byline of Mr. X. The entire serial was reprinted under Hoch’s own name in Ellery Queen’s Anthology, Spring-Summer 1982.

  ULYSSES S. BIRD was Hoch’s attempt to fashion a criminal character who would not turn into a detective-in-spite-of-himself. The first of this con artist’s four published exploits was “The Million-Dollar Jewel Caper” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1973), but all of them were negligible except the third, “The Credit Card Caper” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1974), which is a gem.

  SEBASTIAN BLUE and LAURA CHARME, investigators for Interpol, vaguely resemble the stars of the classic British TV series The Avengers, but as usual when Hoch spins off a series from a preexisting source, he moves it into the domain of fair-play detection. The characters have appeared more than a dozen times in EQMM, beginning with “The Case of the Third Apostle” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1973).

  PAUL TOWER, who becomes involved in criminal problems while visiting local schools as part of the police department’s public relations program, was suggested to Hoch as a character by Fred Dannay. “The Lollipop Cop” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1974) and Tower’s two subsequent cases were excellent, and it’s a shame the character was retired so quickly.

  DR. SAM HAWTHORNE, Hoch’s most successful character of the 1970s, narrates his own reminis
cences of impossible crime puzzles that he unofficially investigated in the late 1920s and early thirties while serving as a young physician in the New England village of Northmont. To date he has spun yarns and offered “a small libation” to his listeners more than forty times, beginning with “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1974), which remains one of the best in the series. Hoch’s Northmont long ago surpassed Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville as small-town America’s Mecca for bizarre crimes.

  BARNABUS REX, a humorous sleuth of the future who debuted in “The Homesick Chicken” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977), has since appeared in only one other story. But two cases make a series character even in the world of tomorrow.

  TOMMY PRESTON, the young son of a zookeeper, was created by Hoch for the juvenile book market. In The Monkey’s Clue & The Stolen Sapphire (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) he solves a pair of mysteries involving animals.

  NANCY TRENTINO, an attractive policewoman with a deductive flair, could almost be Connie Trent from the Captain Leopold series under a different name. Which is precisely what she was, until the editors of Hers (later Woman’s World) who bought her first solo case asked Hoch to give her more of an ethnic flavor. Since her debut in “The Dog That Barked All Day” (Hers, October 1, 1979), she has solved a handful of puzzles.

  CHARLES SPACER, electronics executive and undercover U.S. agent, figures in espionage detective tales, the first of which was “Assignment: Enigma” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 10, 1980), published as by Anthony Circus. (Later Spacers are under Hoch’s own byline.) The ambience of all these tales and the pseudonym on the first may vaguely suggest John Le Carré, but the leitmotif as usual in Hoch is the game of wits.

  SIR GIDEON PARROT, whose name reminds us of two of John Dickson Carr’s mastersleuths and one of Agatha Christie’s, stars in a series of gently nostalgic parodies of the Golden Age deductive puzzles on which Hoch was weaned. His first appearance was in “Lady of the Impossible” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 20, 1981).