Four years ago, Mysterical-E published a brief essay of mine called “Impossible Pleasures,” which deals with my favorite type of traditional detective story, one in which the question is not only who done it, but also how.
Mystery lovers were recently saddened by the passing of Edward D. Hoch, undoubtedly the most prolific exponent of the mystery short story and one of its greatest craftsmen. Mr. Hoch was a master of the impossible crime story.
This brings me to Crippen & Landru, the company that only publishes mystery short story collections in handsome hardcovers and trade paperbacks. C&L is owned and operated by Douglas G. Greene, respected anthologist (The Locked Room Reader, with Robert Adey; Detection by Gaslight; The Detections of Miss Cusack, with Jack Adrian; R. Austin Freeman’s The Dead Hand and Other Uncollected Stories, with Tony Medawar); biographer (John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles), and editor (John Dickson Carr’s The Door to Doom and Merrivale, March, and Murder).
I own five C&L titles, four of which are by Mr. Hoch, the fifth by Joseph Commings, another impossible crime specialist. Before I discuss those, however, let me mention that C&L has a huge list of titles and authors that will please fans of both traditional and hardboiled detective stories.
Now, on to the titles I own and can heartily recommend.
Diagnosis: Impossible and More Things Impossible feature Mr. Hoch’s New England country doctor/sleuth Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Each is related in the first-person as Dr. Sam, after pouring his regular visitor “a small libation,” regales him with the puzzles he solved starting in 1922 when he first came to the town of Northmont. The stories progress forward in time, and each involves a seemingly impossible situation. Among these are how a horse and carriage vanished from inside a covered bridge, how a man was stabbed while alone in a voting booth, how an actor was apparently strangled by a haunted oak tree, and how someone was stabbed in the locked cockpit of a plane in flight.
Mr. Hoch created a multitude of colorful characters, one of whom was master thief Nick Velvet, fourteen of whose adventures are collected in The Velvet Touch.
Nick Velvet is unique in that he only steals for his clients items of no value for a $20,000 fee. Titles like “The Theft of Nothing at All,” “The Theft of the Four of Spades,” “The Theft of the Overdue Library Book,” and “The Theft of the Bald Man’s Comb” will give you an idea of what I mean. Of course, the thefts invariably lead Velvet into deeper mysteries he has to solve.
He also occasionally teams with or competes against the beautiful Sandra Paris, a.k.a. “The White Queen,” a stellar thief herself whose motto is “Impossible Things Before Breakfast.” As the motto implies, Velvet must sometimes solve the “impossible” situations.
The Ripper of Storyville is a collection of fourteen stories about Mr. Hoch’s peripatetic cowboy sleuth Ben Snow. Snow bears a striking resemblance to Billy the Kid, which frequently gets him into trouble. His adventures sometimes lead him into the realm of the impossible--e.g., the steamboat that vanishes in the middle of the river after it leaves Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the locked-room problem in “The Phantom Stallion.” I’m not generally a fan of historical mysteries, but the Ben Snow stories are gems of that sub-genre. I never considered Mr. Hoch a writer of “dark” fiction, but some of these stories surprised me.
Mr. Hoch also collaborated with Joseph Commings on a story titled “Stairway to Nowhere,” featuring Commings’ series sleuth Senator Brooks U. Banner, a gaudy and memorable figure. Until C&L collected this and thirteen other Banner stories as part of their Lost Classics series in the collection Banner Deadlines, only a few had been anthologized. Most originally appeared in pulp magazines.
The Banner stories are tantalizing in their premises. Consider, for instance—and here I’m quoting from the book’s back cover—a “murder at a séance where everyone is strait-jacketed together and linked by touching feet…a killing in a sealed glass case, and a murder by a sword which must have been wielded by a giant. The most extraordinary story of all is ‘The X Street Murders,’ in which the victim is shot in a guarded room and the smoking-gun is delivered, a few seconds later, in a sealed envelope next door.” Although some of Commings’ solutions are a little too mechanical for my taste, I tore through this collection enthusiastically, and I hope there will be another.
Mystery fans owe Douglas Greene an enormous debt of gratitude for the Crippen & Landru titles—past, present, and forthcoming. They can repay him by purchasing some of the books I’ve mentioned as well as others, and nourish themselves by supping on some of the finest stories the genre has produced.
Barry Ergang © 2008
Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages.
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