Leopold's Way: Detective Stories

By Edward D. Hoch

When the homicide boys are baffled, only Captain Leopold can unravel the mystery.

On his way to the circus, a young boy named Tommy pauses for fifteen minutes in a grassy vacant lot. It begins to rain, and by the time the storm has passed, Tommy is dead in the tall grass, strangled with a strong piece of rope. Police suspicion falls on a shifty ex-con employed by the circus, but Captain Leopold isn't satisfied with this too-simple solution. Something strange happened in that vacant lot, and it will take a moment of brilliance to divine what it was.

Luckily, Captain Leopold has brilliance to spare. In these stories, he confronts dozens of fiendish puzzles, each murder more astonishing than the last. He is a lonely man, and his city is a cruel one, but only Leopold has the wit to find out the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784085537

Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch (1930–2008) was a master of the mystery short story. Born in Rochester, New York, he sold his first story, “The Village of the Dead,” to Famous Detective Stories, then one of the last remaining old-time pulps. The tale introduced Simon Ark, a two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest who became one of Hoch’s many series characters. Others included small-town doctor Sam Hawthorne, police detective Captain Leopold, and Revolutionary War secret agent Alexander Swift. By rotating through his stable of characters, most of whom aged with time, Hoch was able to achieve extreme productivity, selling stories to Argosy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which published a story of his in every issue from 1973 until his death. In all, Hoch wrote nearly one thousand short tales, making him one of the most prolific story writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the 1968 Edgar Award for “The Oblong Room,” and in 2001 became the first short story writer to be named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.