REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

   
EDWARD D. HOCH – Diagnosis: Impossible. Sam Hawthorne; collection #1. Crippen & Landru, hardcover/paperback, 1996.

   I’m a great fan of locked room/ impossible-situation crime fiction, and it’s always a pleasure to come across some enjoyable examples of same. This is a collection of the first dozen stories in the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series, set in the 1920ss. Hawthorne is a country doctor practicing in the town of Northmost Connecticut, where he encounters vanishing buggies, murderous ghosts, escaping prisoners, murder in a voting booth and killer trees – among other things.

   The one I enjoyed most had a time capsule, about to be buried qt the county fair, found to have a body in it…. this despite the fact that it was in plain sight and empty when the various articles were deposited in it a few hours before.

   Since the stories run about 15 pages or so, there isn’t such room for character development, though recurring characters do round out in reading twelve in a row. It’s the ingenuity of the stunts and their explanation that matter most, and here Mr. Hoch is quite clever.

   At the end Marv Lachman (to whom this volume is dedicated along with his wife) provides a checklist of 59 stories (through July 2000) with their dates of publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the time in which the story is set. Since I didn’t read the stories when they appeared in the magazine, I can only hope that further volumes will be published.

— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #17, January 2002.