Leopold's Way Read Free

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 dropped so quickly.
    DR. SAM HAWTHORNE, Hoch’s most successful character of the 1970s, narrates his own reminiscences of impossible crime puzzles which he unofficially investigated in the late 1920s and early ’30s 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 two dozen 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 has long ago overtaken 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 more 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 late in 1984, she becomes the latest 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 others. Prize Meets Murder (Pocket Books, 1984) and This Prize Is Dangerous (Pocket Books, 1985) are published as by R. T. Edwards. (As this collection went to press, it became uncertain whether Pocket Books would actually publish This Prize Is Dangerous.)
    Now that the troops have passed in review, it’s time we turned to the protagonist of this collection and the most durable Hoch sleuth of them all.
    When Captain Leopold first appeared in print, no one noticed, for he began life as a subsidiary character in two Hoch short stories of 1957, and only five years later, in “Circus” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, January 1962), did he become a protagonist in his own right. The saga has since