All But Impossible Read online

  All But Impossible

  by Edward D. Hoch

  Books by Edward D. Hoch Crippen & Landru, Publishers

  Diagnosis: Impossible, The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Available as a print book and as a Kindle e-book

  The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales. Available as a Kindle e-book

  The Velvet Touch. Available as a Kindle e-book

  The Old Spies Club and Other Intrigues of Rand. Available as a Kindle e-book

  The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth. Available as a Kindle e-book

  More Things Impossible, The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Available as a print book and as a Kindle e-book

  Nothing Is Impossible, Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Available as a print book and as a Kindle e-book

  All But Impossible, The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Available as a print book and (forthcoming) as a Kindle e-book

  Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 by Edward D. Hoch

  This edition copyright © 2017 by Patricia M. Hoch

  Cover Design by Gail Cross

  ISBN (limited clothbound edition): 978-1-936363-21-6

  ISBN (trade softcover edition): 978-1-936363-22-3

  FIRST EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America on recycled acid-free paper

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  P.O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505

  USA

  e-mail: [email protected]

  web: www.crippenlandru.com

  CONTENTS

  Contents

  Ed Hoch: Some Memories

  The Problem of The Country Church

  The Problem of The Grange Hall

  The Problem of The Vanishing Salesman

  The Problem of the Leather Man

  The Problem of The Phantom Parlor

  The Problem of The Poisoned Pool

  The Problem of The Missing Roadhouse

  The Problem of The Country Mailbox

  The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery

  The Problem of the Enormous Owl

  The Problem of The Miraculous Jar

  The Problem of The Enchanted Terrace

  The Problem of The Unfound Door

  The Second Problem of The Covered Bridge

  The Problem of The Scarecrow Congress

  A Dr. Sam Hawthorne Checklist

  Subscriptions

  Ed Hoch: Some Memories

  It was during the early 1970s that I first started reading Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine regularly. Copies were always for sale at grocery checkout counters for 75 cents—this was, after all, more than forty years ago. I would turn first to stories by Edward D. Hoch. They were always well told, they had interesting characters and settings, and they were usually fairplay detective stories with all the clues given to the reader. During 1971 the issues also contained stories written by the pseudonymous “Mr. X.” Under the series title “The Will-o’- the-Wisp-Mystery,” each of the six stories was complete in itself but each ended in a cliffhanger leading to the next story. This, I said to myself, was the way a mystery story should be told. It was only later that I learned the “Mr. X’ was actually Edward D. Hoch, and the idea behind the series was the brainchild of Ellery Queen himself.

  Later that year, I found on a newsstand a paperback book, in the same format as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, with the title The Spy and the Thief, and its author was (I was delighted to discover) Edward D. Hoch. The book featured two of Hoch’s series characters, Jeffery Rand and Nick Velvet, and the introduction was by Ellery Queen. The introduction mentioned in passing that Hoch had written another short story collection—one that I had never heard of (The Judges of Hades) about a character about whom I was also unfamiliar (Simon Ark). I looked and looked but couldn’t find a copy anywhere—this was long before the Internet.

  With some trepidation, I decided to screw my courage to the sticking post (whatever Shakespeare might have meant by that phrase) and wrote to Hoch himself in care of the magazine. A short while later, a parcel arrived from the author enclosing not only a copy of the book (warmly inscribed) but also a second Simon Ark collection, City of Brass. All of which is a long way of saying that I discovered that Ed Hoch was not only a wonderful writer but a heck of a nice guy as well.

  Ed Hoch was a rare writer, probably a unique one, in that he made a living as the author of short stories. Decades ago, in the heyday of the pulp magazines (like Black Mask and Dime Detective) and the mass market “slicks” (like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s), a writer could be a short-story specialist, but today’s market doesn’t allow such specialization—unless you happen to be Ed Hoch. He eventually wrote about 960 short stories in various genres—science fiction, Westerns, historicals, young adult, and several very fine ghost stories—which are collected in The Future Is Ours, 32 Tales of the Fantastic, edited by Steven Steinbock—but he quickly emphasized mysteries and detective stories. He tried writing novels. One, The Shattered Raven, featured the Mystery Writers of America. He also wrote a series of three novels, beginning with The Transvection Machine, about the Computer Cops investigating future crimes. He even became a ghost writer for one of the paperback original novels that was credited to “Ellery Queen” —The Blue Movie Murders. But he said a week or two after he started on a novel, he wanted to work on other ideas that were always bubbling up inside his brain.

  And in many ways that was the key to Ed’s genius. An idea would come to him—a way of murdering someone in a locked room, a crime committed in a cabin surrounded by unmarked snow, a person who jumps from a window and vanishes—and it would percolate in his head; he would ponder it, manipulate it, come up with an original way of handling it, and a compact story would emerge. Ed loved a challenge. Friends would dare him to come up with a solution to an ingenious situation—and almost nothing would stump him for long, When he was challenged to devise a murder within the rotating door of a department store, he, of course, solved it. I was with him when he began to think about a plot device as he got on an escalator and had it worked out by the time he got off. I suggested that he write a story based on a famous plot device, the “Paris Exposition” story, a late-19th, early 20th century legend of a mother and daughter who arrive at a hotel at the Paris Exposition in 1889. The girl leaves the hotel for an hour or two, but when she returns her mother has vanished and the hotel denies that she was ever there. In some versions, even the room in the hotel has vanished. Mystery writers from Anna Katharine Green to Cornell Woolrich to John Dickson Carr adapted various parts of this story, and such movies as Bunny Lake Is Missing and the television series Monk also used it. Ed, of course, had little trouble devising an original variant in “The Problem of the Leather Man,” and he slyly used my name in it for a character who, in fact, doesn’t actually appear.

  Ed’s first published story was “Village of the Dead” about Simon Ark; it was published in 1955 in Famous Detective, one of the last of the pulp magazines. Ark was Hoch’s tribute to the long tradition of detectives who investigate the occult. Ark spoke an ancient Coptic tongue and he implied that he had been alive for 2000 years. The cases he solved had to do with weird religious rituals and witchcraft and vampires. Soon Hoch was inventing series character after series character: Father David Noone, who combined Catholic theology with crime solving; Captain Jules Leopold of a city very much like Hoch’s hometown of Rochester, New York; Ben Snow, a cowboy detective in the old West who is often confused with Billy the Kid. In 1962, he broke into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, then as now the two premier magazines in the field. By the time I was a regular reader of EQMM in 1971, he was in almost every issue, and beginning in May 1973 he began an unbroken record of being in every issue for the next thirty-five years. Eventually, he was pictured six times on the cover of EQMM, a record surpassed only by Sherlock Holmes.

  And he continued to devise series characters, some of the most imaginative ever to come from the pen of a mystery monger. Nick Velvet became a perennial favorite—a choosy crook who would steal only something that was considered worthless—a bald man’s comb, water from a swimming pool, a birthday cake, a cigar, a balloon, a cobweb. The mystery was why anyone would pay to steal such items, and often Nick would also have to solve a crime along the way in order to avoid being arrested. Another favorite was Jeffery Rand, who began during the height of the James Bond spy craze as an expert on “concealed communications,” and whose adventures continued to involve international intrigue. And Michael Vlado, a Gypsy King who solves crimes mainly in eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire. And con-man Ulysses S. Bird. And spy for George Washington, Alexander Swift, in an evocative historical series. Unlike many male authors, whose attempts to see matters through the eyes of women were, at best, embarrassing, Hoch created several persuasive female sleuths, including policewoman Annie Sears and department-store buyer Susan Holt, whose business life took her around the world. Hoch also created a youthful pair of crime-solving couriers, Juliet Ives and Walt Stanton.

  For many readers—myself included—Hoch’s finest creation was Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England country doctor from the first half of the last century who is faced with a series of impossible crimes—a wagon that enters a covered bridge and vanishes, a man murdered in a voting booth, a child who disappears from a swing, another child who vanishes from a bicycle, even one that seems to re-create Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous tale of th
e yellow wallpaper as an impossible crime.

  As wonderful as these stories are in their ingenuity and superb storytelling, I remember Ed Hoch mainly for himself. After he sent me those two books in 1971, Ed and I corresponded and spoke on the phone frequently until we met in person in 1986 at a Bouchercon in Baltimore. From then on, we saw each other at every Bouchercon and almost every Malice Domestic convention. Joined by our close friend Steve Steinbock—who now writes the book review column for EQMM—Ed and Ed’s wife Pat and I would have dinner together and debate whose turn it was to be the host. Ed would always order the same dinner—filet mignon cooked well-done (to the consistency of a hockey puck) and french fries, with vanilla ice cream for dessert—except at the Bouchercon in Denver in 2000 when we went to a Western restaurant which not only had a young woman in tights and a feather boa on a trapeze overhead but also Western meats on the menu. I can’t recall whether we persuaded him to have buffalo or elk, but it was one or the other. He survived.

  Ed had an encyclopedic knowledge of mystery and detective fiction, and he knew everyone worth knowing in the field. It is often said of people that he or she “never had a bad word to say about anyone,” and then someone will smirk knowingly and (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) recall when he or she did in fact have some bad words—but that was never true about Ed. I cannot recall when he ever said anything unkind or ungenerous.

  Like Anthony Boucher before him, Ed was a devout Roman Catholic with a strong concern for social justice. Often we would talk about religion. On one occasion at a Bouchercon, Steve Steinbock and I were at a bar (where else?) discussing some point or other about religious doctrine, he from a Jewish viewpoint, I from a Christian (Episcopalian) perspective, when we saw Ed coming down the stairs across the lobby. Steve and I remember differently which one of us yelled, “Ed! Come here; we need a Catholic!” Ed, of course, came over. I am sure we never resolved anything, but friends don’t need to.

  On January 18, 2008, Janet Hutchings, the Editor of EQMM, called me to say that Ed had died suddenly that morning. I was in shock. The mystery community had lost a great writer; the world had lost a great and good human being; but personally—and this was uppermost in my mind, and still is—I had lost a close friend.

  Douglas G. Greene

  The Problem of The Country Church

  This was in November of ’36 [Dr. Sam Hawthorne told his visitor, filling their glasses with the usual small libation]—just after President Roosevelt’s re-election. My former nurse April had been happily married for nearly two years to Andre Mulhone, owner of the Greenbush Inn, a popular Maine resort hotel. They’d recently had their first child, a boy they named Sam after me, and I’d been asked to be his godfather. It was an honor I couldn’t refuse.

  So it was that I drove up to southern Maine on that second week-end in November, leaving Mary Best to handle things at the office, referring patients to Dr. Potter, a friend who’d agreed to handle any emergencies. By this time of year the trees were bare in Maine, and I was surprised not to find any trace of snow on the ground. It had been a warm autumn, but Friday had turned cold and rainy and I half expected the rain to become snow as I drove north. Instead there was sunshine, and I reached the Greenbush Inn before dinnertime.

  Andre came out from behind the registration desk to shake hands. “It’s great to see you again, Dr. Sam! April and I are overjoyed you’re going to be Sam’s godfather.” Mulhone came from a French-Irish background. His first wife had died in an auto accident. He was a handsome man, older than April, and his cosmopolitan interests had opened a whole new world to her.

  I was happy for them both.

  April appeared a moment later, coming through the swinging door from the kitchen. “Sam, how are you? It’s so good of you to come.”

  “You know I wouldn’t miss the baptism. Where’s it to be held?”

  “At a little country church near here called St. George in the Woods. The minister comes here for dinner once a week and we’ve grown quite friendly.”

  She glanced into the dining room and took my arm. “Come meet your namesake’s godmother.”

  Ivy Preston was one of the waitresses at the inn, a sleek brunette whose brown eyes fixed me with an open stare. “So you’re the unmarried doctor.”

  “Ivy!” April pretended shock.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ivy,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Forgive me, Dr. Hawthorne. April is always trying to find me a boyfriend and I like to kid her about it.”

  “Call me Sam,” I told her. “I won’t take it as being too personal.”

  Andre walked over to join us. “Are the women ganging up on you, Sam?”

  “I can handle it,” I reassured him.

  “Have you seen little Sam yet?” Ivy asked.

  “I just got here.”

  “He’s adorable! Let’s have a peek at him, April.”

  Sam Mulhone, barely a month old, was in a blue bassinet on a side table in the kitchen. The cook, a middle-aged Frenchman named Henri, was taking time out from his pre-dinner chores to tickle the baby gently under the chin.

  I smiled and said, “He looks just like you, April.”

  “Don’t let his father hear you say that. He has baby pictures to prove Sam is a Mulhone through and through.”

  The baby was chubby and good-natured, with a wisp of brownish hair.

  “Does he keep you awake at night?”

  “He hasn’t been bad at all. Once he goes to sleep, nothing seems to bother him. If we’re lucky, he’ll sleep right through his christening tomorrow.”

  As we left the kitchen, I said, “Tell me about yourself, April. Do you work here in the kitchen?”

  “I help out sometimes, but mostly I handle the registrations and the accounts books. Our business has really grown in the past two years, Sam. We’re a popular resort and also a fine dining place. The summer people even drive up from New Hampshire to have dinner here. Andre’s been very successful.”

  “Do you ever miss nursing?”

  “Yes. But working for you in the office wasn’t the same as hospital nursing. I was taking care of your books, doing many of the same things I’m doing here. I like it. Of course, now that Sam’s on the scene, I’ll be looking after him a good share of the time.”

  Ivy went back to work as the first dinner customers arrived. So showed a couple to a table by the window and presented them with menus. “That used to be another of my jobs,” April said, “but I think Ivy will be taking it over now.”

  “She seems very agreeable.”

  “I hope you didn’t mind being kidded about your bachelorhood. Actually, Ivy has a boy friend, a young man who does odd jobs around here, Joe Curtiss. He picks up guests at the train station and fixes things. He shovels snow in the winter. He even rigged up a snowplow that the horse can pull.”

  “No need for that yet.”

  She laughed. “Remember all the snow the first time we came here when I met Andre?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “How’s your new nurse doing?”

  “Mary’s doing fine—she’s a great help to me. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss you, though.”

  A sandy-haired young man came through the front door carrying a pile of firewood. “Just in case it turns chilly tonight,” he told April. “I’ll leave it by the fireplace.”

  “Thanks, Joe. Dr. Sam, this is Joe Curtiss. Meet Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Joe. He’s going to be Sam’s godfather tomorrow.”

  The young man grinned in response. “I wish I could be there. But I have to take some people to the train. Nice to meet you, Dr. Hawthorne.”

  He added the wood to a stack next to the fireplace, then went off to speak with Ivy.

  “How many employees do you have here in all?” I asked April.

  “Well, if you count Andre and me there are twelve full-time people and another six who come in part-time when we need them.”

  Andre joined us again. “Remember, Dr. Sam, we talked once about skiing becoming a popular American sport? I may not live to see it but my son will. There’ll be a day when this area has trails blazed through the woods and down the sides of the mountains. People will come from all over the Northeast to ski in a New England winter, the way Europeans go to Switzerland now.”