THERE CAN BE NO DISPUTE that the master of the impossible-crime puzzle is John Dickson Carr; both under his own name and as Carter Dickson, he tirelessly published in this most difficult genre from 1931 to 1972. There can also be no argument that the closest in reputation and achievement is Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008), who wrote nearly as many of these brain twisters during a career that spanned more than a half century (1955–2008). Most detective story writers shied away from this type of tale after Carr established himself as the lord of the locked-room mystery, conceding that just about every possible variation had been employed. Hoch not only accepted the challenge but created a series character, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, whose every mystery featured an impossible crime. His first case was “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” in the December 1974 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Hawthorne is a retired old (he was born in 1896) country doctor who practiced in a small town from the 1920s through the 1940s and reminisces about the improbable murders that occurred during the years in which he tended to the townspeople.
Hoch’s most famous stories, not about Hawthorne, are the frequently anthologized “The Oblong Room” (1967), for which he won the Edgar Award, and “The Long Way Down” (1965), in which a man goes out the window of a skyscraper but doesn’t land for two hours; it was the basis for a two-hour episode of the television series McMillan and Wife titled “Freefall to Terror,” which aired on November 11, 1973. Hoch was named a Grand Master for lifetime achievement by the Mystery Writers of America in 2001.
“The Problem of the Old Oak Tree” was first published in the July 1978 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Diagnosis: Impossible (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 1996).