Night My Friend (2 page)

FATHER DAVID NOONE, parish priest and occasional detective, began life in 1964 as Hoch’s version of a clerical sleuth in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. He was dropped after two rather feeble cases but came back to play a major role in “The Sweating Statue” (in
Detectives A to Z,
ed. Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, 1985), which Hoch considers his best Noone story.

RAND, of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications, was created in 1964 for
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and has since appeared in more than sixty episodes of espionage laced with cryptography and detection. Originally called Randolph, he was renamed because
EQMM
editor Fred Dannay wanted a name subliminally evoking James Bond even though there was nothing Bond-like about the stories. The series began with “The Spy Who Did Nothing” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
May 1965), and most of the Rands retain “The Spy Who” in their titles, reminding us that the greatest espionage novel of the era in which Rand came to life was John Le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Rand is now officially in retirement but Hoch still brings him back for an
EQMM
assignment once or twice a year. Seven of his early cases are collected in the paperback volume
The Spy and the Thief
(Davis Publications, 1971).

NICK VELVET is perhaps the best-known Hoch character, a thief who steals only objects of no value and who is usually forced to play detective in the course of his thieving. He debuted in “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
September 1966) and quickly became an international hit. More than sixty short Velvets have been published over the past quarter century. Seven of Nick’s early capers are included in
The Spy and the Thief
and a total of fourteen (of which two come from the earlier volume) are collected in
The Thefts of Nick Velvet
(Mysterious Press, 1978). Several books of Velvet stories have been published in Japan and, rechristened Nick Verlaine, our contemporary Raffles has been the star of a French TV mini-series. The character has been under option by 20th Century-Fox for several years and may yet make it to prime time in America.

HARRY PONDER, a short-lived spy-cum-sleuth whose name suggests the Len Deighton-Michael Caine movie spy Harry Palmer, first appeared in “The Magic Bullet” (
Argosy,
January 1969), an excellent mix of espionage and impossible-crime detection, but was dropped after one more case.

BARNEY HAMET, a New York mystery writer, turned amateur sleuth in Hoch’s first novel,
The Shattered Raven
(Lancer, 1969), and helped untangle a murder at the Mystery Writers of America annual dinner. In the short story “Murder at the Bouchercon” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
November 1983), Hamet probes another killing among his colleagues and joins the roster of Hoch series characters.

CARL CRADER and EARL JAZINE, who solve crimes for the Federal Computer Investigation Bureau in the early 21st century, were created by Hoch in “Computer Cops,” a story he wrote for Hans Stefan Santesson’s science fiction-mystery anthology
Crime Prevention in the 30th Century
(Walker, 1969). Later Hoch starred them in his trilogy of futuristic detective novels:
The Transvection Machine
(Walker, 1971),
The Fellowship of the Hand
(Walker, 1972), and
The Frankenstein Factory
(Warner Paperback Library, 1975). They haven’t been seen since.

DAVID PIPER, director of the Department of Apprehension and also known as The Manhunter, shows that even when Hoch creates a character with a superficial resemblance to The Executioner, The Butcher, and similar macho action heroes, he converts the man into a mainstream detective. Piper starred in a six-installment serial, “The Will-o’-the-Wisp Mystery,” published in
EQMM
between April and September of 1971 under the byline of Mr. X. The entire serial was reprinted under Hoch’s own name in
Ellery Queen’s Anthology
, Spring-Summer 1982.

ULYSSES S. BIRD was Hoch’s attempt to fashion a criminal character who would not turn into a detective-in-spite-of-himself. The first of this con artist’s four published exploits was “The Million-Dollar Jewel Caper” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
January 1973), but all of them were negligible except the third, “The Credit Card Caper” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
October 1974), which is a gem.

SEBASTIAN BLUE and LAURA CHARME, investigators for Interpol, vaguely resemble the stars of the classic British TV series
The Avengers,
but as usual when Hoch spins off a series from a preexisting source, he moves it into the domain of fair-play detection. The characters have appeared more than a dozen times in
EQMM
, beginning with “The Case of the Third Apostle” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
February 1973).

PAUL TOWER, who becomes involved in criminal problems while visiting local schools as part of the police department’s public relations program, was suggested to Hoch as a character by Fred Dannay. “The Lollipop Cop” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
March 1974) and Tower’s two subsequent cases were excellent, and it’s a shame the character was retired so quickly.

DR. SAM HAWTHORNE, Hoch’s most successful character of the 1970s, narrates his own reminiscences of impossible crime puzzles that he unofficially investigated in the late 1920s and early thirties while serving as a young physician in the New England village of Northmont. To date he has spun yarns and offered “a small libation” to his listeners more than forty times, beginning with “The Problem of the Covered Bridge”
(Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
December 1974), which remains one of the best in the series. Hoch’s Northmont long ago surpassed Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville as small-town America’s Mecca for bizarre crimes.

BARNABUS REX, a humorous sleuth of the future who debuted in “The Homesick Chicken” (
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
Spring 1977), has since appeared in only one other story. But two cases make a series character even in the world of tomorrow.

TOMMY PRESTON, the young son of a zookeeper, was created by Hoch for the juvenile book market. In
The Monkey’s Clue & The Stolen Sapphire
(Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) he solves a pair of mysteries involving animals.

NANCY TRENTINO, an attractive policewoman with a deductive flair, could almost be Connie Trent from the Captain Leopold series under a different name. Which is precisely what she was, until the editors of
Hers
(later
Woman’s World
) who bought her first solo case asked Hoch to give her more of an ethnic flavor. Since her debut in “The Dog That Barked All Day” (
Hers
, October 1, 1979), she has solved a handful of puzzles.

CHARLES SPACER, electronics executive and undercover U.S. agent, figures in espionage detective tales, the first of which was “Assignment: Enigma” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
September 10, 1980), published as by Anthony Circus. (Later Spacers are under Hoch’s own byline.) The ambience of all these tales and the pseudonym on the first may vaguely suggest John Le Carré, but the leitmotif as usual in Hoch is the game of wits.

SIR GIDEON PARROT, whose name reminds us of two of John Dickson Carr’s mastersleuths and one of Agatha Christie’s, stars in a series of gently nostalgic parodies of the Golden Age deductive puzzles on which Hoch was weaned. His first appearance was in “Lady of the Impossible” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, May 20, 1981).

LIBBY KNOWLES, ex-cop and professional bodyguard, debuted in “Five-Day Forecast,” a Hoch story first published in
Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes,
edited by Eleanor Sullivan (Davis, 1984). With her second case, published in
EQMM
later that year, she became an affirmative action recruit in Hoch’s small army of series characters.

MATTHEW PRIZE, criminology professor and ex-private eye, is the detective in a pair of paperback mystery puzzles inspired by Thomas Chastain’s best-selling
Who Killed the Robins Family?
(1983). Hoch created the plot outlines for these books, just as Fred Dannay did for the Ellery Queen novels, and the writing was done by Ron Goulart.
Prize Meets Murder
(Pocket Books, 1984) and
This Prize Is Dangerous
(London: Star Books, 1985) were published as by R. T. Edwards.

MICHAEL VLADO, farmer, horse trainer, and leader of a gypsy community in Romania, is the latest and perhaps most unlikely of the amateur sleuths in the Hoch gallery. His first appearance was in “The Luck of a Gypsy” (in
The Ethnic Detectives,
ed. Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, 1985), and within a few days after the publication of that anthology he became a series character with “Odds on a Gypsy” (
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July
1985). Since then he has starred in a handful of
EQMM
tales with East European settings.

That in twenty-four nutshells is the Ed Hoch everyone knows, the master of clues and puzzles whom we encounter in every issue of
EQMM
and almost every mystery anthology of the past twenty years.
The Night My Friend
celebrates the unfamiliar side of his output, bringing together some of the best of his two hundred-odd non-series stories.

Many of Hoch’s earliest published stories featured the occult character Simon Ark, but even in his first few years as a writer he diversified quickly and widely. In 1956 and 1957, when his name began popping up regularly in magazines, he published not only Simon Ark exploits but PI stories, westerns, science fiction, horror, and a total of eight non-series crime tales. He first made his presence felt in a major way in the early 1960s when large numbers of his stories were published in the mystery field’s top magazines,
Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock,
and
The Saint.
All of the tales collected in
The Night My Friend
date from this decade and all but the last few from its early and middle years, before he gave up his job in advertising to write full time.

If the distinction of almost every Hoch story about a continuing character is its fair-play detective element, no common thread connects his finest non-series tales. There may be an abundance of detection—as in that supreme impossible-crime puzzler “The Long Way Down”—or none at all. There may be a main character who might easily have been put into a series—like songwriter Johnny Nocturne of “The Night My Friend”—or a protagonist who could never return, or no central figure whatever. An occasional touch, such as the use of a picnic or amusement-park setting or of beer as everyone’s beverage of choice, may remind the Hoch fan of some of his better-known series work, but most of the building blocks of the tales collected here have no counterparts in his stories about recurring characters. 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 II, including “To Slay an Eagle,” which is as bleak as the espionage fiction of Greene or Le Carré; 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 since the early and middle 1960s when he was writing mysteries only as a moonlighter.

Those were the years when I was in my late teens and discovered him. We’ve known each other for going on a quarter century now, and our collected correspondence would fill a book the size of
War and Peace.
It’s been a pleasure to savor these stories again for myself and it’s even more of a pleasure to bring them together and share them with Ed Hoch’s legion of readers.

FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.

D
ALE FIELDING HEARD THE
phone ringing from his inner office, and remembered that the girl had gone out to the bank. He pressed the proper button on his phone and picked it up. “Fielding Insurance Agency, Dale Fielding speaking.”

“Fielding, this is an old buddy of yours. Harvey Stout.” The phone turned to ice in Dale’s grip. “I just got in town and thought I’d look you up.”

“Hello, Harvey.” His mind was racing, tearing through a thousand possibilities.

“That all you’ve got to say to an old buddy?”

“What’s up, Harvey? What do you want?”

“Just to see you again, Fielding. That’s all.” The voice still had the same bitter edge to it, the same deadly friendliness he remembered.

“I’m pretty busy, Harvey. If you’re just passing through town…”

“No, boy. I got lots of time. Suppose I run out to your house tonight—meet the wife and kiddies. There are kiddies, aren’t there?”

Dale ignored the question with a sigh. “Look, where are you now? Maybe I can meet you for a quick drink or something.”

“Fine, fine! That’s more like it. I’m over at the hotel. The Riverview. I’ll meet you at the bar in ten minutes.”

“All right,” Dale managed, and hung up. Harvey Stout, after all these years. He lit a cigarette and tried to calm his jumping nerves and thought about calling his wife. No, that would do no good. The police? What would he tell them? What would he tell anybody? Certainly not the truth.

The truth was an island in the Pacific called le Shima, a tiny hunk of rock just barely large enough for the airfield that made it so important. It was some three miles off Okinawa, and perhaps was destined to be remembered only as the place where a burst of Japanese machine-gun fire cut through the body of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Certainly no one but his family would remember that Captain Mason died there, in the final bitter moments of a bloody battle.

Mason, Charles F., Captain, U.S.M.C. Age: thirty-one at the time of his death. Married, no children. Born in Dallas, Texas, of an oil-rich family.