Tue 20 Aug 2019
Stories I’m Reading: EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft from the Onyx Pool.”
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft from the Onyx Pool.” Nick Velvet #2. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1967. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3) and The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1978.)
The charm of the Nick Velvet stories to me is how clever they are, and in fact, they have to be. Not only does Nick have to figure out how to steal the essentially valueless objects he’s hired to obtain, but he also has to work out why he was hired to steal them in the first place. (In this story originally published in 1967, his fee is $20,000.)
In this case Nick is hired by a young woman of some beauty and obvious social standing to steal the water from a famous writer’s pool. She does not want the pool drained. She wants him to steal the water. That’s the job. Nick, being am inquisitive fellow, once again needs to know why.
Two detective stories in one, both cleverly worked out to the finest detail. How did Hoch do it, over and over again, and this time in only eleven pages?
August 21st, 2019 at 10:50 am
This is indeed a terrific story!
It establishes many of the paradigms of the Nick Velvet tales.
Although it is #2 in the series, in many ways it is the first “real” Nick Velvet tale, the one ancestral to all the others.
A library near here used to have a copy of “The Thefts of Nick Velvet”. That’s where I read it.
August 21st, 2019 at 11:16 am
Mike
You’re right. Nick Velvet #1 is fairly ordinary. The ones who hire him are planning to use his theft only as a diversion to commit a even more lucrative theft of their own. I don’t think Hoch ever used that particular ploy again
August 21st, 2019 at 7:09 pm
This one put Nick on equal footing with the greatest rascals in the genre. You can almost hear Lupin, Raffles, and Blackshirt cheering him on.
July 28th, 2023 at 12:04 am
[…] EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft from the Onyx Pool.†NickVelvet is hired to steal 10,000 gallons of water from a swimming pool. (4) [Note: I reviewed his story separately on this blog here.] […]