“Yes, he did, Señor; he thought of that as a remote possibility just before he sent the wire to you. We considered hiring someone to steal your watches in California, and having him bribe a jeweller to sell you non-magnetic ones. But Dr Marlin decided that it would take too much time. He was always afraid that someone else would claim the reward.”
“Why,” asked my uncle in surprise, “did he think some rival knew his secret?”
“No, Señor, and, besides, very few mediums would have enough money. But it’s a strange thing – all his life Dr Marlin had been a charlatan and a fraud, but always he believed that some of the other mediums were genuine. All the time he was getting things ready, he was afraid that some yogi from India, with genuine psychic powers, would appear and claim the reward by really demonstrating the Indian Rope Trick.”
The Problem of The Black Cloister by Edward D. Hoch
Let us bow to the Master. No, not John Dickson Carr. Carr may have set the rules for the impossible crime story and created most of the templates, but Edward Hoch (b. 1930) has now written considerably more stories than Carr and created far more variations on old ideas as well as plenty of new ones. I never cease to be amazed at Hoch’s output. He has now been selling short fiction for over fifty years and has had at least one story, sometimes more, in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since May 1973. He’s steadily creeping towards having written and published one thousand stories, and precious few living writers can say that. Of the eighteen or so new stories that Ed produces each year, three or four of them are impossible crime stories-so he’s probably written around 200 of them by now. Many of his stories fall into one of a number of series, and almost all of his series characters have had to face an impossible crime now and then. One of them, Dr Sam Hawthorne, who narrates his stories to his anonymous guest about cases from his early years in practice, encounters nothing but impossible crimes. So far there have been two collections of Hawthorne’s cases, Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and More Things Impossible (2006).
I could clearly have filled this book solely with Ed’s baffling mysteries, and certainly felt that only one selection did not do justice to the Imp of the Impossible, especially as Ed has also written the occasional perfect-crime story. So here are two by the Master. The first is a Sam Hawthorne story, followed immediately by a non-series story containing one of Ed’s most creative crimes.
Less than a week after the 1942 election that insured a seventh and final term for Sheriff Lens, the Allied invasion of French North Africa began. It was a joyous time for everyone, a sign that we had launched a major ground offensive at last. (Dr Sam Hawthorne paused to refill the glass of his listener.) It was also a time for war-bond rallies in the cities, when celebrities sometimes came to help raise money for the war effort.
Towns like Northmont ordinarily would not have attracted a war-bond rally on any large scale, but as it turned out we had a local celebrity hardly anyone knew about. The November election brought us a new mayor, Cyril Bensmith, a slender, vigorous man of forty, a bit younger than me. I’d hardly known him before he ran for office, and I didn’t know him much better now. His family had a small farm over near the town line, almost into the adjoining township of Shinn Corners, which probably explains why I hadn’t heard about him or his boyhood chum Rusty Wagner.
Rusty’d been George Snider at the time. He didn’t become Rusty till he moved to New York and landed the villain’s role in a mildly successful Broadway play. From there he went off to Hollywood and became Paramount’s answer to Humphrey Bogart. He was never as big a star as Bogart, but by April of 1943, with the Allies advancing in Tunisia and many of the younger male stars in the service, Rusty Wagner was doing his part by touring the country selling war bonds. Health problems and his age, just turning forty, had kept him out of the army. When Mayor Bensmith heard he’d be at a rally in Boston he invited his old friend to make a side trip to his hometown.
“Did you hear the news?” my nurse April asked that morning. “Rusty Wagner is coming here for the war-bond drive.”
“We don’t go to many movies,” I admitted, though the town boasted a pretty good theater. “I guess I’ve seen him once or twice.”
“I’m going to help out on the drive,” she said. April’s husband Andre was away in the service and I could understand her urge to get involved.
“That’s good. I’ll come and buy a bond from you,” I promised.
That night at home I mentioned it to my wife Annabel, who showed a bit more excitement than I had. “That’s great news, Sam! Something’s finally happening in this town.”
I smiled at her remark. “A lot of people think too much happens here already. Our murder rate-”
“I wish you wouldn’t blame yourself whenever somebody gets killed in Northmont. I’m sure there were murders here before you ever came to town. I’ll have to ask Sheriff Lens when he and his wife come to dinner.”
The sheriff had been elected to his first term in 1918, just days before the armistice that ended the war. I hadn’t moved to town and set up my practice until a few years later, in January of ’22, and for some reason we’d never really talked much about Northmont’s past crimes.
We dined with Sheriff Lens and his wife Vera every couple of months, and it was their turn to come to our house two nights later. While Vera helped Annabel with dinner in the kitchen I engaged the sheriff in conversation. “Annabel and I were talking the other night about Northmont’s crime rate. How was it before I came here in ’twenty-two? Did you have just as many murders?”
Sheriff Lens chuckled, resting his hand on the glass of sherry my wife had provided. “Can’t say that I remember any at all before you came to town, Doc. Guess you brought ’em with you.” He took a sip from the glass and added, “There was the fire over at the Black Cloister, of course, but no one ever suggested that was murder.”
I’d driven past the burnt-out building several times during the past twenty years, wondering why the county didn’t just tear it down and sell the land at auction. “Exactly what happened there?” I asked.
“Well, it was in the late summer of ’twenty-one. The place had been built late last century as a sort of farming commune for disenchanted monks and other religious men who’d left their various orders but weren’t ready to return to the secular world. Occasionally they took in one or two juvenile offenders if the courts asked them to, on the theory that a hard day’s work might set them straight. Nobody paid much attention to them out there, except about once a month when a couple of them came into town for supplies. They called it the Black Cloister, named for the Augustinian monastery in Germany where Martin Luther lived. After the Reformation the monks moved out but Luther continued to live there, offering shelter to former monks and travelers. Upon his marriage in fifteen twenty-five the building was given to him as a wedding gift.”
“You know a good deal about it, Sheriff.”
“Well, Vera’s a Lutheran even though we were married by a Baptist minister. We got talking about the Black Cloister one night and she filled me in on all that history.”
“I heard my name mentioned,” Vera Lens said as she came in to join us. “Dinner will be ready in three minutes.”
“Doc was just wondering about the Black Cloister,” the sheriff explained.