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.
10 comments:
Thanks.
Nice coincidence - I just finished the newest Hoch collection, THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP MYSTERY. In 1971, Hoch (as "Mr. X") published 6 monthly interconnected stories under that title. Six prisoners (five men and a woman), being transferred, escape and are on the run. They range from swindlers, bank robbers and forgers to murderers and an underworld boss. It is the job of David Piper of the Department of Apprehension, "The Manhunter," to track them down and recapture them.
The second half of the book consists of seven stories about Father David Noone, a Roman Catholic priest, and what is interesting here is that the stories were written over a 40 year period, from 1963 to 2004. They are not particularly innovative, but there is good atmosphere and, as always, ingenious solutions.
You can't go wrong with Edward D. Hoch.
Good morning. I have a post for this week: https://casualdebris.blogspot.com/2024/10/casual-shorts-isfdb-top-short-fiction.html
Thanks
I wish I had a copy of this. I will probably get a copy eventually or read the ebook as using Kindle Unlimited when I sign up again.
Great review by Jeff. I do have one book of Samuel Hawthorne stories that I got from Rick Robinson's library (MORE THINGS IMPOSSIBLE).
Speaking of sources of short fiction--Patti during your tenure at Curtis Publishing, do you remember an in-house magazine called TAKE FIVE? https://gustaftenggren.blogspot.com/2013/09/some-weeks-ago-ispent-four-days-with.html ...at FictionMags, we're trying to figure out if it carried any fiction or anything more relevant than Behind-the-Scenes info about how SEP and perhaps the others were put together.
Meanwhile, in an oddly rushed week in some ways, I'd like to submit my 1970 Club post as also an SSW: https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2024/10/fritz-leiber-swords-and-deviltry-ace.html
Is it just me or does George Kelly's site get blocked for others too? I receive a warning, and when I proceed despite warning, I land on a maintenance page.
Just tried it, with no connection problem. George has mentioned some hassles with WordPress over the last week or so, but try it again and see what happens.
You definitely can't. And I was lucky enough to meet him once and speak with him briefly, a very gentlemanly sort, and later very happy that I mentioned in a public Q&A (at the Capital Mystery Bouchercon in Alexandria in 2001) that Robert Lowndes had been his first very receptive editor, at the last of the Double Action/Columbia line of fiction magazines, both CF and SF magazines, and continuing for a bit in his lower budget Health Knowledge fiction magazines, after Hoch had begun to establish himself with more lucrative markets. About the only way I was able to publicly Help Out both him and those curious about his work was to make sure, at TV GUIDE and related products we fed info to, that a progroma he'd done with Canada's closest approach to PBS, TV Ontario, had proper episode description copy attached to it.
He did write some fine short stories, and it astounds me that the quality is, overall, very good, considering how many he wrote.
Like Jeff, I enjoyed THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP MYSTERY. I read CHALLENGE THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL PROBLEMS OF DR. SAM HAWTHORNE by Edward D. Hoch a few years ago and enjoyed it as well.
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