reviewed by Jeff Meyerson
Edward D. Hoch, Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru 2018).
When
I thought of which book to choose for the first of these short story
collections to review, the choice was fairly easy. Why not go with
possibly the most prolific short story writer ever, a man who published
over 950 stories, including one or more in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for 35 years?
Ed Hoch created a dozen or more series characters of varying types, but
my favorite remains the impossible crime specialist, small town
Connecticut doctor Sam Hawthorne, who had some 72 recorded cases,
published between 1974 and 2008, of a remarkably high quality. Hoch did
something interesting here, besides the ingenuity of the stories
themselves, by setting them in a specific time and place, a smallish
town in Connecticut between the doctor's arrival in 1922 and his final
story, in 1944. You always get a feel for what was going on in the
world then, from the Depression to the Second World War. Crippen &
Landru has done fans a favor by publishing all 72 stories in five
volumes (of which this is, clearly, the last), all with "Impossible" in
the title. From the first story, "The Problem of the Covered Bridge,"
in which a man drives into a covered bridge and seems to vanish off the
face of the Earth, Hoch was a master at coming up with truly
impossible-seeming crimes and then providing mostly brilliant
solutions. I'd recommend starting at the beginning and reading all five
volumes, but you can't go wrong with any of them.
Jeff Meyerson
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