Leopold's Way (2 page)

CAPTAIN LEOPOLD,
the protagonist of the present collection, will be considered at greater length after the rest of the parade has passed by.

FATHER DAVID NOONE,
parish priest and occasional detective, was Hoch's version of a clerical sleuth in the great tradition of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, but was dropped after two rather feeble cases, beginning in 1964.

RAND,
of Britain's Department of Concealed Communications, was created in 1964 for
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and has since appeared in more than fifty short episodes of espionage with strong elements of cryptography and fair-play deduction. Originally called Randolph, the character was renamed at the suggestion of
EQMM
editor Fred Dannay, who wanted a name that subliminally evoked James Bond even though there wasn't a thing Bond-like about the stories. The series began with “The Spy Who Did Nothing”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
May 1965), and most of the Rands retain “The Spy Who” in their titles, reminding us that the greatest espionage novel of the era in which Rand came to life was John LeCarré's
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
Rand is now officially in retirement, but Hoch still brings him back for an
EQMM
assignment once or twice a year. Seven of his early cases are collected in the paperback volume
The Spy and the Thief
(Davis Publications, 1971).

NICK VELVET
is perhaps Hoch's best-known character, a thief who steals only objects of no value and who is usually forced to play detective in the course of his thieving. He debuted in “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
September 1966) and quickly became an international hit. More than fifty short Velvets have been published over the past twenty years. Seven of Nick's early capers are included in
The Spy and the Thief,
and a total of fourteen (of which two come from the earlier volume) are collected in
The Thefts of Nick Velvet
(Mysterious Press, 1978). Several books of Velvet stories have been published in Japan and, re-christened Nick Verlaine, our contemporary Raffles has been the star of a French TV mini-series. The character is presently under option by 20th Century-Fox and may receive prime-time exposure on NBC if all goes well.

HARRY PONDER,
a short-lived spy-cum-sleuth whose name subliminally suggests the Len Deighton-Michael Caine movie spy Harry Palmer, first appeared in “The Magic Bullet”
(Argosy,
January 1969), an excellent mixture of espionage and impossible-crime detection, but was dropped after one more case.

BARNEY HAMET,
a New York mystery writer, turned amateur sleuth in Hoch's first novel,
The Shattered Raven
(Lancer, 1969), and helped untangle a murder at the Mystery Writers of America organization's annual dinner. In a recent short story, “Murder at the Bouchercon”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
November 1983), Hamet probes another killing among his colleagues and adds himself to the roster of Hoch series characters.

CARL CRADER
and
EARL JAZINE,
who solve crimes for the Federal Computer Investigation Bureau in the early 21st century, were created by Hoch in “Computer Cops,” a story he wrote for Hans Stefan Santesson's science fiction-mystery anthology
Crime Prevention in the 30th Century
(Walker, 1969). Later Hoch made them the protagonists in his trilogy of futuristic detective novels:
The Transvection Machine
(Walker, 1971),
The Fellowship of the Hand
(Walker, 1972), and
The Frankenstein Factory
(Warner Paperback Library, 1975). They haven't been seen since.

DAVID PIPER,
director of the Department of Apprehension and popularly known as The Manhunter, shows that even when Hoch creates a character in the tradition of The Executioner, The Butcher, and other macho action heroes, he converts the man into a mainstream detective. Piper starred in a six-installment serial, “The Will-o'-the-Wisp Mystery,” published in
EQMM
between April and September of 1971 under the byline of Mr. X. The entire serial was reprinted under Hoch's own name in
Ellery Queen's Anthology,
Spring-Summer 1982.

ULYSSES S. BIRD
was Hoch's attempt to fashion a criminal character who would not turn into a detective-in-spite-of-himself. The first of this con artist's four published exploits was “The Million-Dollar Jewel Caper”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
January 1973), but all of them were negligible except the third, “The Credit Card Caper”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
October 1974), which is a gem.

SEBASTIAN BLUE
and
LAURA CHARME,
investigators for Interpol, vaguely resemble the stars of the popular British TV series
The Avengers,
but as usual when Hoch spins off a series from a preexisting source, he moves it into the domain of fair-play detection. The characters have appeared more than fifteen times in
EQMM,
beginning with “The Case of the Third Apostle”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
February 1973).

PAUL TOWER,
who becomes involved in criminal problems while visiting local schools as part of the police department's public relations program, was suggested to Hoch as a character by Fred Dannay. “The 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 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 with the New York City Police Department. In the late 1950s he returned to head the city's Homicide Squad. He had married several years earlier but the ten-year relationship shattered a few years after he accepted the Monroe position, and he never saw his wife again until her tragic reunion with him in “The Leopold Locked Room”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
October 1971). After the divorce he lives an exceptionally lonely life, drowning his solitude in work. His one serious affair of the '60s comes to an end when he has to arrest the woman for murder in “The Rusty Rose”
(Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,
May 1966.) Thereafter his only pleasures in life are the solitary satisfactions of smoking and reading. By the late '60s he's fighting to kick the tobacco habit, as were countless Americans who were frightened by the 1964 Surgeon General's Report, and apparently he licks it at last. But he remains as avid a reader as ever, referring at various times to Chesterton, Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway and Le Carré among others. In the tales of the '70s he's described as “middle-aged and stocky,” but gratifyingly enough, feminism and the sexual revolution enrich his emotional life as he encounters a number of younger professional women. With policewoman Connie Trent, who enters the saga in “Captain Leopold Gets Angry”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
March 1973) and presently holds the rank of Detective Sergeant, he is clearly tempted to have more than a working relationship, but he resists for the same reason that he won't bring his personal auto to be washed at the police garage, and forces himself to think of her only as the daughter he never had. His relationship with pathologist Dr. Lawn Gaylord, whom he first meets in “Captain Leopold Looks for the Cause”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
November 1977), is less inhibited but leads nowhere. His luck improves with defense attorney Molly Calendar, whom he first encounters in “Captain Leopold Beats the Machine”
(Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
June 1983) and who becomes the second Mrs. Leopold at the close of “Finding Joe Finch” (
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
February 1984). Whether this marriage will work out or run into snags like that of another divorced police captain with a beautiful defense attorney who are the Thursday evening favorites of millions of televiewers (including Ed and Pat Hoch), only time will tell.