With Halloween only a couple of weeks away, I'm going to offer some real treats today: a collection of delightfully tricky short stories, each of which features an impossible crime or locked room situation. The stories are the work of the late Edward D. Hoch, and the book, "More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne," is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Ed Hoch was a fine writer, one of the most prolific creators of short mystery stories. He wrote several different series; the ones he wrote featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne all included impossible situations - cases where things happen that apparently can't be explained in any rational way (which, to my mind, makes them perfect for Halloween) - and yet which will ultimately be shown to have natural, rather than supernatural, solutions.
What kind of imossible situations? Among them:
- Two couples disappear from a houseboat floating on a lake (and never out of sight of the shore);
- Impossible murder in a whispering house;
- A man is stabbed in the locked cockpit of a small private plane while the plane is in midair;
- An invisible killer stalks Boston Common;
- A murder in a lighthouse may have been committed by a pirate ghost;
- The gypsy who died with a bullet in his heart - and no wound on the body.
There are fifteen of these amazing stories, all quite ingenious, each with a unique solution, all great fun. In his introduction to this Crippen & Landru collection, Hoch wrote, "I've now published 68 of them [Dr. Sam stories], and I don't believe I've ever duplicated an idea, or a solution." That's a pretty remarkable statistic. Enjoy these Halloween bonbons - but, to paraphrase the potato chip ad, I'll bet you can't read just one.
[Updated to fix typo in the headline]
What we really need is a complete omnibus of Hoch's tales. I've read only a handful of them thus far and have been impressed each time.
Posted by: Patrick | October 17, 2011 at 08:35 PM
Patrick, I know Crippen & Landru have published other volumes of Hoch...I'm not sure what else they may have in store. I think it would be hard to gather everything into one volume - I believe Hoch wrote nearly a thousand stories during his lifetime!
Posted by: Les Blatt | October 17, 2011 at 08:45 PM
Precisely-- isn't the irony plain? An apparently impossible project for an author who specialised in apparently impossible crimes? :)
Though I suppose we'll just have to wait for a perfect world or Heaven to get such a tome...
Posted by: Patrick | October 19, 2011 at 10:06 AM