Leopold's Way Read Free Page A

grown mightily, with a total of seventy-two Leopolds published as of the end of 1984, making it the most numerous of Hoch’s twenty-three series. (Rand and Nick Velvet with a few over fifty exploits apiece are the nearest runners-up.)
    Why has Hoch written more about Leopold than about any other continuing character? I suspect because it’s the most flexible of his series, the least restrictive in terms of plot requirements: for a Leopold he needn’t come up with a new worthless object to be stolen or a new espionage-detection wrinkle but simply has to create a fresh detective plot, and these seem to come to him as naturally as breathing. But if anything sets off the Leopolds from Hoch’s other series, it’s that they frequently offer so much more than clever plots and gimmicks. In the best Leopold tales Hoch fuses the detective gamesmanship stuff of the Ellery Queen tradition with elements derived from Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, burying unexpected nuances of character and emotion and meaning beneath the surface of his deceptively simple style.
    But beyond their individual strengths, when these stories are read in chronological order, as they are arranged in Leopold’s Way, they take on something of the nature of an episodic novel, with characters who appear, vanish and return, grow and suffer and die. Leopold is around forty years old when we first meet him in “Circus” and near sixty when we say goodbye to him in “The Most Dangerous Man Alive,” and the stories reflect not only his own development from the early 1960s through the end of the ’70s but also that of the large northeastern city in which he serves as the resident Maigret.
    The city is not named in any story collected here, but in “The Killer and the Clown” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 14, 1981) it’s given the name of Monroe, which is the name of the county in which Hoch’s native Rochester is situated. As he visualizes the fictitious city, he says, it “bears some slight resemblance to Rochester turned upside-down, with the Sound substituting for Lake Ontario.”
    The origins of Leopold himself are more complex. Hoch says he took the name “from Jules Leopold, a frequent contributor to a puzzle magazine I read as a youth.” In “Suddenly in September” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1983), a recent story not collected here, Leopold admits for the first time in the series that his first name is Jules—which of course is the first name of Simenon’s immortal Maigret. Although in one sense this is a coincidence—Hoch says that he read very little of Simenon till around 1964—it’s one of the most fitting coincidences in crime fiction. For the Simenonian feel in many of the best Leopold tales is palpable, and Leopold himself is a sort of Maigret who works by rational deduction rather than immersion in a milieu and intuition.
    The main events of his life are described at various points in the saga and form a biography as complete as the sketches Simenon habitually prepared for the protagonists of his nonseries novels. Jules Leopold was born in Chicago in 1921. His parents died in an accident when he was eight, and he spent the next six years in the Midwest community of Riger Falls, being raised by relatives whom we meet in “Captain Leopold Goes Home” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1975). At age fourteen he came to Monroe, apparently to stay with other relatives, and graduated from George Washington High in 1939. Even then he was considered the class brain. He entered Columbia University, was awarded his degree during World War II and joined Army Intelligence, serving first in Washington and later in North Africa, where he interrogated Italian prisoners. After the war he opted for a career in police work and spent a short time with a force out west, then a stint in Monroe, then a period