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Doyen of the 'impossible' mystery
The American author Edward D. Hoch was one of the very last of a now all-but-extinct species: the professional fictioneer who writes solely for periodical publication. In a career that spanned over 50 years, Ed Hoch wrote and sold nearly a thousand short stories, principally in the mystery, spy and detective fiction genres, a record which will surely never be beaten, matched or even approached.
Although his first sales were to the last remaining pulp magazines, Hoch's early career coincided with the extraordinary explosion of digest-sized monthlies that crowded the news-stand counters and truckstop book carousels of North America in the 1950s and early-1960s. He wrote for Two-Fisted Detective, Guilty!, Crime and Justice, Terror Detective, Killers Mystery Story, Off-Beat Detective, Tightrope, Web Detective and Shock!, and even managed to crack Mystery Digest, whose innocent-sounding title hid one of the most bizarre publishing policies of its era (its eccentric editor Rolfe Passer majored in UFO stories, strange sex stories, mind- power stories and lunatic-fringe cult stories, the more preposterous the better - Hoch's single tale of murder, "Journey to Death", in February 1959, was fairly mild by comparison with most of the Mystery Digest output).
In later years, as publishing tastes changed and the weaker digests fell by the wayside, Hoch aimed his typewriter mainly at the "Big Three" mystery fiction monthlies: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the granddaddy of them all, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which he cracked in December 1962 and in whose pages he became almost the one fixed point in a changing world. In fact he appeared in every single issue of EQMM from late 1973 up to the day he died (and will probably continue to appear for a good few months posthumously, thanks to a backlog of stories held by the editor).
Not content with being merely prolific, Hoch also sought to turn a fondness for one of the most challenging sub-genres in the entire mystery field into a speciality, and succeeded triumphantly. He was recognised, throughout his long career, as the doyen of...