OVER THE COURSE of the last half century or more, it has been virtually impossible for an author to earn a living as a short-story writer, but Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008) was that rare exception. He produced about nine hundred stories in his career, approximately half of them published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, beginning in 1962. In May of 1973, Hoch started a remarkable run of publishing at least one story in every issue of EQMM until his death—and beyond, as he had already delivered additional stories.
Readers have never been able to decide which is their favorite of Hoch’s series characters, but there can be little argument that his most unusual is Simon Ark, who was the protagonist of his first published story, “Village of the Dead,” which ran in the December 1955 issue of Famous Detective Stories, one of the last pulp magazines. Ark looks to be an ordinary man in his sixties but claims to be a two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest who has spent the past two millennia touring the globe in search of Satan in order to do battle with him. Is he really what he claims to be? The author has never answered the question, preferring to leave the decision to readers. The stories always present a fantastic situation (the disappearance of all the people in a village, the murder of one member of a cult in a dark cellar while all the other members are hanging from crucifixes) but are resolved in the classic detective manner of observation and deduction, without any supernatural elements playing a role. Ark stories have been collected in several volumes: The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971), City of Brass and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971), and The Quests of Simon Ark (1984).
“The Man from Nowhere” was first published in the June 1956 issue of Famous Detective Stories; it was first collected in The Quests of Simon Ark (New York, Mysterious Press, 1984).