With some trepidation, I decided to screw my courage to the sticking post (whatever Shakespeare might have meant by that phrase) and wrote to Hoch himself in care of the magazine. A short while later, a parcel arrived from the author enclosing not only a copy of the book (warmly inscribed) but also a second Simon Ark collection, City of Brass. All of which is a long way of saying that I discovered that Ed Hoch was not only a wonderful writer but a heck of a nice guy as well.

And in many ways that was the key to Ed’s genius. An idea would come to him—a way of murdering someone in a locked room, a crime committed in a cabin surrounded by unmarked snow, a person who jumps from a window and vanishes—and it would percolate in his head; he would ponder it, manipulate it, come up with an original way of handling it, and a compact story would emerge. Ed loved a challenge. Friends would dare him to come up with a solution to an ingenious situation—and almost nothing would stump him for long, When he was challenged to devise a murder within the rotating door of a department store, he, of course, solved it. I was with him when he began to think about a plot device as he got on an escalator and would have it worked out by the time he got off. I suggested that he write a story based on a famous plot device, the “Paris Exposition” story, a late-19th, early 20th century legend of a mother and son who arrive at a hotel at the Paris Exposition in 1889. The lad leaves the hotel for an hour or two, but when he returns his mother has vanished and the hotel denies that she was ever there. In some versions, even the room in the hotel has vanished. Mystery writers from Anna Katharine Green to Cornell Woolrich to John Dickson Carr adapted various parts of this story, and such movies as Bunny Lake Is Missing and the television series Monk also used it. Ed, of course, had little trouble devising an original variant in “The Problem of the Leather Man,” and he slyly used my name in it for a character who, in fact, doesn’t actually appear.

Ed’s first published story was “Village of the Dead” about Simon Ark; it was published in 1955 in Famous Detective, one of the last of the pulp magazines. Ark was Hoch’s tribute to the long tradition of detectives who investigate the occult. Ark spoke an ancient Coptic tongue and he implied that he had been alive for 2000 years. The cases he solved had to do with weird religious rituals and witchcraft and vampires. Soon Hoch was inventing series character after series character: Father David Noone, who combined Catholic theology with crime solving; Captain Jules Leopold of a city very much like Hoch’s hometown of Rochestesr, New York; Ben Snow, a cowboy detective in the old West who is often confused with Billy the Kid. In 1962, he broke into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, then as now the two premier magazines in the field. By the time I was a regular reader of EQMM in 1971, he was in almost every issue, and beginning in May 1973 he began an unbroken record of being in every issue for the next thirty-five years. Eventually, he was pictured six times on the cover of EQMM, a record surpassed only by Sherlock Holmes.

And he continued to devise series characters, some of the most imaginative ever to come from the pen of a mystery monger. Nick Velvet became a perennial favorite—a choosy crook who would steal only something that was considered worthless—a bald man’s comb, water from a swimming pool, a birthday cake, a cigar, a balloon, a cobweb. The mystery was why anyone would pay to steal such items, and often Nick would also have to solve a crime along the way in order to avoid being arrested. Another favorite was Jeffrey Rand, who began during the height of the James Bond spy craze as an expert on “concealed communications,” and whose adventures continued to involve international intrigue. And Michael Vlado, a Gypsy King who solves crimes mainly in eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire. And con man Ulysses S. Bird. And spy for George Washington, Alexander Swift, in an evocative historical series. Unlike many male authors, whose attempts to see matters through the eyes of women were, at best, embarrassing, Hoch created several persuasive female sleuths, including policewoman

Annie Sears and department-store buyer Susan Holt, whose business life took her around the world. Hoch also created a youthful pair of crime-solving couriers, Juliet Ives and Walt Stanton.

For many readers—myself included—Hoch’s finest creation was Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England country doctor from the first half of the last century who is faced with a series of impossible crimes—a wagon that enters a covered bridge and vanishes, a man murdered in a voting booth, a child who disappears from a swing, another child who vanishes from a bicycle, even one that seems to re-create Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous tale of the yellow wallpaper as an impossible crime.

As wonderful as these stories are in their ingenuity and superb storytelling, I remember Ed Hoch mainly for himself. After he sent me those two books in 1971, Ed and I corresponded and spoke on the phone frequently until we met in person in 1986 at a Bouchercon in Baltimore. From then on, we saw each other at every Bouchercon and almost every Malice Domestic convention. Joined by our close friend Steve Steinbock—who now writes the book review column for EQMM—Ed and Ed’s wife Pat and I would have dinner together and debate whose turn it was to be the host. Ed would always order the same dinner—filet mignon cooked well-done (to the consistency of a hockey puck) and french fries, with vanilla ice cream for dessert—except at the Bouchercon in Denver in 2000 when we went to a Western restaurant which not only had a young woman in tights and a feather boa on a trapeze overhead but also Western meats on the menu. I can’t recall whether we persuaded him to have buffalo or elk, but it was one or the other. He survived.