Short Story Wednesday, CHALLENGE THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL PROBLEMS OF DR. SAM HAWTHORNE, Edward D. Hoch

 

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.

 

George Kelley 

TracyK

Casual Debris

Jerry House

Monday, Monday

 

Sorry to see the end of SLOW HORSES and PACHINKO. But am still enjoying MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, THE ENGLISH TEACHER, and the new Cate Blanchett series, DISCLAIMER. 

Saw BASQUIAT at the Detroit Film Theater (from 1996). Jeffrey Wright did a great job of playing Basquiat although the film was so loaded with famous actors it was disconcerting trying to remember them. I don't remember seeing this one at the time. Then I was able to watch JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT: A RADIANT CHILD on Kanopy, which gave a lot of context and criticism to his work.

Sunday I saw a play in Ann Arbor at Theater Nova. IN SEARCH OF THE MOTHMAN. Two fine actresses did their best with a muddled script. This seemed like a good first draft.

Finished THE SHRED SISTERS by Betsy Lerner and about to start BRIAN, Jeremy Cooper.

We finally got some rain and boy, did it smell good. What makes some rain smell and others not. 

What are you up to?

FFB BRIARPATCH, Ross Thomas

 (from the archives)

from: Libby Fischer Hellmann

Briarpatch, by Ross Thomas

My favorite “forgotten” novel is Briarpatch by Ross Thomas. I’d already published three novels when I stumbled onto it, but when I did, I instantly knew why I write the books I do. Its structure, style, and substance are an indispensable template, and its dog-eared pages will stay in my library forever.

Briarpatch is a structural chameleon. Technically, it’s an amateur sleuth novel. Ben Dill, a Senate staffer in Washington DC journeys to an unnamed Southern city to bury his sister, a homicide detective killed in a bomb explosion. While there, he intends to find out why she died. In short order, though, characters are introduced, complications mount, and by page thirty I wasn’t sure whether I was reading a police procedural, a PI novel, or a thriller, complete with ambitious politicians, intelligence operatives, and arms-dealing mercenaries. In the hands of a lesser talent, this complexity might be disastrous, but Thomas weaves the threads into a seamless, satisfying story.

The prose in Briarpatch -- spare, lucid, silky -- is just this side of Chandler. It has rhythm. And pace. And while it’s easy to read, it’s never dull. Sometimes Thomas breaks the rules, having fun with alliteration, for example, or planting his tongue firmly in his cheek. But the writing is never offensive, and a too clever sentence is redeemed in the next with a thoughtful observation. I come away from Briarpatch thinking Thomas says what he means and yet it means so much more.

I grew up in Washington D.C., and when my family gossiped about the neighbors, we were essentially talking politics. As a result, stories that touch on national or global issues draw me like a moth to the light. Fold in murder, suspense, and small town corruption that stretches to the nation’s capital, and I’m a goner. (I learned after I read Briarpatch that Thomas lived in DC as well). Half way through, I realized we never know the Southern city where Briarpatch takes place, but we don’t need to. It could be any town in which a police chief hungers for higher office, a cop may be on the take, a formerly dirt-poor pal is now a millionaire, and a shady businessman tries to set up his partner.

But perhaps the novel’s most attractive – and durable -- quality is that it’s a story lightly told. Briarpatch never screams or calls attention to itself. Its complexity sneaks up on you-- until you realize you’re in the hands of a master and you’ve been reading a classic. It deserves to be “rediscovered.”

Short Story Wednesday "Hi, Daddy," Matthew Klam, THE NEW YORKER

Our narrator is taking his eighteen year old daughter to the airport where she is flying to Spain to join her boyfriend for a pre-college trip. He is also caring for his aging parents. This would be the circumstance my son finds himself in and I read the story with him in mind. Our narrator is suffering physical symptoms brought on by this double whammy. He has a wife, but she is doing important work so a lot of the everyday stuff falls on him. Also she is more at ease with life moving on than he is. A good story. I will look for more from Matthew Klam. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/hi-daddy-fiction-matthew-klam

George Kelley

TracyK

Monday, Monday

 LEE turned out to be a pretty ordinary biopic. Winslett was very good but the script didn't pursue her more interesting qualities enough. Still it did make me want to find out more about her and her photographs.

Reading THE SHRED SISTERS by Betsy Lerner. A first novel for a woman who has been in publishing for 30 years. 

Going to see MOULIN ROUGE (the show not the movie) at the Detroit Opera House today. 

Still watching SLOW HORSES, PACHINKO, HOMICIDE. Finished NOBODY WANTS THIS which I enjoyed. I am anxious to see what they do with it next. Gave up (again) on ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING. Is it written by AI? Trying WHERE IS WANDA?

Can you imagine our last President having a clue how to handle the world we now live in. I am not really thinking of his domestic horrors but what he would do about the Middle East, Ukraine, etc.  Biden is struggling with it too. It might be an unsolvable crisis. 

What's new in your hood?

Haibun

Articulating Space
Patricia Abbott
Birmingham, Michigan, USA

That winter she made a series of small quilts patterned on Paul Klee paintings there were
difficulties since the library books she used as sources varied in the precise tint of all those
little squares and it was difficult to match them up in fabric since the rectangles lost their
plumb perfection matched end to end though at other times they seemed rigidly square like
a kindergarten teacher’s idea of art and sitting on the floor amongst the pieces she grew
frantic she would ever get it right with the sizes and colors and piecing all dependent on
what appeared to be but wasn’t random choices then once finished the quilts had a
undulating look quite different from her image of the Klees and if she hung them unframed
they seemed bulky and primitive on the white, white walls and if she framed them they
floated crooked like fragile fiber sailboats on a chintz black sea.

beneath my breastbone
you stayed too long
to leave nothing behind

************

This haibun appeared in DRIFTING SANDS HAIBUN JOURNAL, July 2024