MWA Grand Master
Edward D. Hoch was born today in Rochester, NY, in 1930. It's estimated that during his career, he published upward of 900 short stories, particularly in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (EQMM). He received an Edgar for "The Oblong Room" and an Anthony for "The Problem of the Potting Shed." He wrote "V-2," a story for me for
Malice Domestic 8, and I had the pleasure of meeting this gracious man at one EQMM event. He died in 2008.
I met him at the 2001 BoucherCon. An utter gentleman. And I believe, after no lack of stories for magazines going back to Robert Lowndes's Columbia crime-fiction pulps and digests (and Hoch would as a result loyally write for Lowndes's even lower-budget horror and suspense magazines published by Health Knowledge in the '60s), that he had a story of some sort in every issue of EQMM from sometime very much like early 1973 till after his death. A run comparable to the pop-science essays Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov wrote for other fiction magazines.
ReplyDeleteEd Hoch is one of my all-time favorite mystery writers. Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Captain Leopold and Nick Velvet are my favorite sleuths. What a great loss to the mystery world with his premature departure.
ReplyDelete