WITH THE PASSING of Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008), the pure detective story lost its most inventive and prolific practitioner of the past half century. While never hailed as a great stylist, Hoch’s mystery fiction presented old-fashioned puzzles in clear, no-nonsense prose that rarely took a false step and consistently proved satisfying in most of his approximately nine hundred stories.
Born in Rochester, New York, Hoch (pronounced hoke) attended the University of Rochester before serving in the army (1950–1952). He then worked in advertising while writing on the side. When sales became sufficiently frequent, he became a full-time fiction writer in 1968, producing stories for all the major digest-sized magazines, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Hoch wanted to create a series character specifically for EQMM, who turned out to be the professional thief Nick Velvet (whose original name was Nicholas Velvetta), the author’s attempt to create an American counterpart to the hugely successful James Bond. The character quickly changed because Hoch didn’t like the idea of his protagonist being a woman-chasing killer; Velvet remained faithful to his longtime girlfriend, Gloria Merchant, whom he met while he was burgling her apartment and who had no idea that he was a thief until 1979. The first Nick Velvet story, “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger,” was published in the September 1966 issue of EQMM. Two major elements in the stories have made them among Hoch’s most popular work: since he will not steal anything of intrinsic value, there is the mystery of why someone would pay Nick Velvet twenty thousand dollars (fifty thousand dollars in later stories) to steal it, and then the near impossibility of the theft itself (which included such items as a spider web, the water from a swimming pool, a day-old newspaper, a baseball team, and a sea serpent).
“The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” was first published in the June 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (New York, Mysterious Press, 1978).