- Edward D. Hoch was and is the undisputed master of the mystery short story.
His total output of published short fiction hovers just under 1,000 stories.
Hoch (pronounced "Hoke") is best remembered for his fair-play and impossible
crime short stories, particularly the series featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a
small-town physician who unraveled seemingly impossible "problems" in 1920s New
England. His other popular series characters included British Intelligence
codebreaker Jeffrey Rand and thief-for-hire Nick Velvet. While a vast majority
of Ed Hoch's stories were mysteries, he enjoyed horror and science fiction. Of
his nine-hundred-plus output, he wrote several handfuls of horror and scifi
stories that appeared in various magazines and anthologies. It could be argued
that his first published story, "Village of the Dead" (which appeared in the
December 1955 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Detective Stories), is as
much horror as it is a mystery. In that story, the mass suicide of an entire
village is investigated by Simon Ark, a mysterious - possibly two-thousand
year old - Coptic Priest.- Here, then, are 29 tales of the future, the fantastic, and the improbable by
a master of the craft: Edward D. Hoch, writer extraordinaire!
- ISBN10 1479403164
- ISBN13 9781479403165
- Publish Date 7 July 2015
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Wildside Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 224
- Language English