Edward D Hoch

Includes stories by 21 of the world's leading crime writers on the theme of identity: identity theft, identity twists, whodunits that turn on the question of 'who indeed'. This work features Grand Masters, Diamond, Silver and Gold Dagger winning writers.

A man who claims to be the Devil is trying to kill him after he witnessed a woman killed by an invisible hand. Lightning bolts that strike from a clear sky, at locations across the globe, to kill a series of former astronauts. A group of friends who sold their souls to the Devil as a joke when they were students find their time is up and the Devil has come to collect. Simon Ark, who may have once been an Egyptian Coptic priest, implies that he is 2000 years old, and he has searched for Satan all these years. The introduction is by Gigi Pandian, an heir to the Impossible Crime tradition. She is the Agatha Award winning author of ten mystery novels and more than a dozen locked room mystery short stories.

In our nearly thirty years of publishing the best of Ed Hoch's short stories, we've neglected Captain Leopold, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad. Along with Lt. Fletcher and Sgt Trent, the stories are as police procedurals; however, Ed Hoch's plotting skills shine in all the stories. The collection contains 15 stories carefully curated just for this book by Hoch expert Roland Lacourbe.

Hoch created many series characters, Among them were Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Jeffery Rand, Nick Velvet, Simon Ark, and Alexander Swift. Several series feature women sleuths. Hoch's ladies were often faced with seemingly impossible crimes - throat cutting in a locked room, shooting of giant cacti, murder in a giant hot air balloon, stabbing in a shower with no one present, poisoning of Chinese food as a last meal of a murderer, and more ingenious methods that will keep the reader guessing. As John Dickson Carr remarked, "Satan himself would be proud of his ingenuity." The introduction is by Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of several books about books, including On Conan Doyle, which received a 2012 Edgar Award from The Mystery Writers of America.

Constant Hearses and Other Revolutionary Mysteries contains not one, but two of Edward D. Hoch's beloved characters. First are the thirteen stories of Alexander Swift, who works for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Swift deals with many of the leaders of the Revolution, including George Washington, John Adams―and Benedict Arnold. All of the stories are contained in this collection. The second character is the decidedly flamboyant Gideon Parrot, the Golden Age detective who uses his brain to solve the most baffling of crimes. All five of the stories are included in this collection.

We ve saved the best for last Follow Dr. Sam Hawthorne through the war years, a time that he called the beginning of two of the most eventful years of my life. The final collection of Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories covers 1940-1944 and includes 15 stories of impossible crimes. From the death of a Siamese cat in a locked veterinary clinic to the death of a Nazi spy, Dr. Sam explains the mysteries that confront the town of Northmont, Connecticut. His cases include: an impossible crime where the wife disappears from the attic where she is confined a murder charge against Sheriff Lens on the cusp of his last campaign for office a case where a man claims to have killed a man using invisibility a cottage where suicides take place too frequently, told to a special visitor to Dr. Sam. While the Dr. Sam stories have come to an end, Crippen & Landru will proudly be presenting Hoch s Ladies next year, featuring the distaff characters from the master of the short story form. That collection will be followed by collections of both Simon Ark and Alexander Swift.

Northmont, Connecticut, seemed to be haunted by ghosts, ghouls, and impossibilities, until Dr. Sam Hawthorne explained the seemingly impossible. All But Impossible contains fifteen of Dr. Sam's most extraordinary cases solved between 1936 and 1940, including A newly murdered corpse in a sealed tomb in a cemetery A body in a scarecrow A jug that turns water into wine -- poisoned wine A disappearance from a swimming pool A baby who becomes a child's doll on the way to being baptized An unfound door A room that appears and vanishes And eight other ingenious problems for Dr. Sam

More Impossible crimes solved by Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

Mystery writer Edward Hoch's career has spanned three and a half decades and produced nearly seven hundred stories. His series characters—there are two dozen of them, including Simon Ark, an occult detective who claims to be two millennia old; Ben Snow, a Western drifter and possible reincarnation of Billy the Kid; Nick Velvet, professional thief, who specializes in stealing items of no value; Libby Knowles, ex-cop turned private bodyguard; and Dr. Sam Hawthorne, small-town New England physician and amateur sleuth—are familiar to mystery readers everywhere. This new collection brings together some of the best of Hoch's more than two hundred non-series stories. The cast of characters includes Johnny Nocturne, "creator of mood music for the night people"; Emerson, a U. S. government hit man operating in the jungle of post-World War Il Europe; and Harry Gordon, whose wife has an unsettling habit of coming back from the dead. As editor Francis M. Nevins, Jr. states in his introduction: "In The Night My Friend you will find a boxing story; a juvenile delinquency story; a prep school reunion story; more than one tale about the aftermath of World War Il…, a fable about a wandering minstrel and his harmonica; and several thrillers with a noir ambience reminiscent of one of the classic TV series of the years when these tales were written, The Fugitive. You will find unusually vivid and visual writing, off-trail settings, complex characterizations, emotions that run deep—in short, a side of Ed Hoch's literary personality that has escaped most readers' attention.