You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.

The stories are essentially historical mysteries beginning in 1922 and running chronologically through several key historical events — prohibition, women’s voting rights, etc. — which fill out an interesting background to the impossible crimes in the foreground. This timing means, too, that Hoch’s solutions, while not always the best, are at least rooted in a mechanical and psychological world familiar to fans of the Golden Age, rather than whipping out some futuristic technology to explain away his effects.

So, how does Dr. Sam get on, in the St. Mary Mead/Midsomer of New England? Let’s find out…

‘The Problem of the Covered Bridge’ (1974) starts our GP’s crime-solving career in wintery New England in 1922, and sees a man two months away from getting married vanish when his four-wheeler carriage appears to enter a covered bridge but, due to an absence of tracks in the snow, does not emerge on the other side.

There’s a clever principle at work here, but I don’t buy the easy existence of (rot13) erirefvoyr ubefrfubr fubrf in 1922. A similar idea was utilised in a novel from 1950 and it feels more workable there, but here, perhaps due to a lack of space given to clewing, it just comes out of nowhere. Still, the story is uncommon for the era it was written in, and it started a looooong career for its detective, so let’s not judge it too harshly.

How can 40 lbs of books tied up in a travelling crate simply vanish while in transit on a train? That’s the impossibility confronting us in ‘The Problem of the Old Gristmill’ (1975). Add in the murder of the man who owned the books and the burning down of the eponymous mill where he lived and you have quite the series of posers on your hands.

The impossibility isn’t hard to fathom out, but that’s at least in part credit to Hoch’s playing fair…even if I’m not sure you could [REDACTED] the [REDACTED] so quickly. Behind it all, though, is an excellent structure and motive, which make up for any slight shortfall in this regard. Also, Dr. Sam likes a cock fight. Who’d’ve thought?

A Houdini-wannabe is chained and tied up in a watched, otherwise-empty cabin, only for the door to be forced ten minutes later and the watching crowd to discover that he’s had his throat cut. So runs ‘The Problem of the Lobster Shack’ (1975), and the answer feels about as complicated as the setup dictates. Crucially, I’m not sure that I believe it — it needs a diagram to really sell me on what happened, for one — which is easily the most important thing in this subgenre.

‘The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand’ (1976) sees a man stabbed at the town’s Fourth of July celebrations in the middle of a crowd…stabbed, no less, by a robed ghost who vanishes in a flash of light. This one’s not bad, but a) ten seconds is aaages to be blinded by a flash of light, making that vanishing slightly less miraculous, and b) surely there’s no need to dress up as a phantom killer if that’s your motive. Just, like, stab the guy in a dark alley or something.

Two impossible situations confront us in ‘The Problem of the Locked Caboose’ (1976): the theft of $250,000 worth of jewels from a safe in a locked train carriage and the stabbing of the man therein who was guarding them. Hoch is good with a light touch in communicating the novelty, and difficulties, of rail travel, but the clue here is hilariously transparent and the means by which our impossibilities achieved somewhat hackneyed. Also, what did the victim think was going to happen…?

The impossible vanishing of a child from a school yard, and the subsequent kidnapping of that child with a demand for a ransom, forms the basis of ‘The Problem of the Little Red Schoolhouse’ (1976). Some good clewing here, it must be said, and a good combination of events to make the mystery a little more thought-out from a real world perspective. Did drugs of this efficacy exist in 1925, though? Well, who cares? Let the fun of it all take over, and don’t ask any silly questions.

An unpopular new clergyman comes to Northmont and welcomes an unpopular band of gypsies to the Christmas Day service in ‘The Problem of the Christmas Steeple’ (1977). The resulting murder isn’t strictly impossible, but since the one person found next to the dead body in an otherwise sealed and untenanted church tower insists on their innocence…well, now you’re talking.

I quite enjoyed this — there’s an obvious masquerade, but the sense of community and of an operable reality is well-achieved, as is the canon-boosting reference to ‘The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand’ — right up until one key aspect ruins it. Seriously, what is it with fiction authors thinking that (rot13) vg’f n dhvpx naq fvzcyr guvat gb chg pybgurf ba n qrnq obql? Could have been avoided, that, and would have been excellent without it.

“The Eel was in Cell 16 at ten o’clock with two locked doors between him and freedom. Two hours later he was gone, with the doors still locked and the window undisturbed” — thus runs ‘The Problem of Cell 16’ (1977), which references Jacques Futerlle’s ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ (1905) in more ways than one. How our anguilliforme French conman escapes is less interesting than the false solution Hawthorne proposes, but it’s not a bad way of rationalising the apparently undoable.

When a masked gunman shoots a man dead and vanishes down a hallway with a bolted door at its terminus, Sheriff Lens is rightly sceptical. When it happens a second time, with Dr. Sam as the witness, it suddenly seems a lot more plausible, despite that meaning that the impossible must, somehow, have happened.

This is ‘The Problem of the Country Inn’ (1977), which is arguably more successful in its B-story — hell, the real success here is in finding space for a B-story at all — since the impossible vanishing requires the reader to be fully excluded from the key occurrence that gives Dr. Sam the clue to its explanation. I don’t mind the answer per se, but I prefer to be clued in on the relevant happenings where my impossible crimes are concerned.

Echoing an episode of Death in Paradise (2011-present) — or, well, that echoed this, since Hoch got there first — ‘The Problem of the Voting Booth’ (1977) sees a man killed while alone and exercising his democratic rights. The Death in Paradise solution is better, and that was far from classic. More enjoyable is Dr. Sam’s incredulity at his nurse April’s potential reading matter. Still, the detection here is more solid than elsewhere, demonstrating some genuine cleverness.

A dead body turns up in a time capsule that had been inspected by countless people who seem likely to have commented on it, so how to explain ‘The Problem of the County Fair’ (1978)? Even more bafflingly, the body only appeared after the capsule had been sealed and buried, meaning someone must have somehow tunnelled to it unseen and passed the body through the capsule’s metal walls.

This — when you overlook the size of the hole that one man had to dig on his own — in ingenious, and the sort of thing that I wish Hoch had come up with more in this collection. On this sort of form I can get very excited about his contribution to the impossible crime beyond merely the number of stories he wrote, and it’s to be hoped that more of this quality awaits in the collections ahead of me.

This first collection ends with ‘The Problem of the Old Oak Tree’ (1978), in which “a man [is] apparently strangled to death by an oak tree”. That man is a stunt performer on a movie being filmed partly in Northmont, and it’s after jumping from a biplane with one other person in it that he’s found hanging in the tree of the title with a wire wrapped around his neck that extinguished his life.

Again, this is a canny story, though it falls down a little on the motivation for making the crime seem impossible — something Hoch has, in fairness, had a pretty strong pedigree with elsewhere. But I can’t deny that this is pretty clever, and makes off a strong one-two punch to end the collection.

A top five, then:

1. ‘The Problem of the County Fair’ (1978)
2. ‘The Problem of the Old Gristmill’ (1975)
3. ‘The Problem of the Old Oak Tree’ (1978)
4. ‘The Problem of the Little Red Schoolhouse’ (1976)
5. ‘The Problem of the Christmas Steeple’ (1977)

You have to admire Hoch’s industry, given that he wrote 900+ short stories in his career; and, sure, the flip side of that is that some of them really don’t work, but he’s never less than readable here, and his familiarity with setting and pacing lulls you in beautifully. I do also really appreciate, as I said up top, his solutions harking back to the Golden Age, because that means that they’re always within your grasp, and when he fools you and rolls out something ingenious then you really get to enjoy it.

I suppose this lacks somewhat in detection at times, but that’s always hard to show in the shorter form and Hoch is good at showing Dr. Sam’s processes when he can. So, while this represents a mixed bag, that’s hardly unexpected, and it certainly doesn’t dent my enthusiasm to read further in this series. I may not venerate him like other fans of his work, but I’m not so obtuse as to deny the huge pleasure his work provides when he hits that correct balance of bafflement and ingenuity. I look forward to more New England impossibilities in the years ahead.

~

The Dr. Sam Hawthorne anthologies, published by Crippen & Landru:

1. Diagnosis: Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2000)
2. More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006)
3. Nothing is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014)
4. All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2017)
5. Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018)