City of Brass: and Other Simon Ark Stories

By Edward D. Hoch

Three stories starring Simon Ark -- one of history's most unusual detectives.

In a college in upstate New York, a professor is carrying out devilish experiments. At Grand Central Station, a student named Cathy Clark corners a friend of her sister's who runs a large publishing company. She tells him of the evil at Baine University, but he dismisses her panic as undergraduate paranoia, so Cathy vows to take matters into her own hands. A few weeks later, she appears in the paper: gunned down on the side of the road.

The only man fit to unravel the mystery is Simon Ark, a friend of the publisher and an aficionado of the peculiar. A two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest, cursed at the Crucifixion to spend eternity wandering the earth, Ark has seen all that the world has to offer. But in these three stories, he will encounter things that even he could never have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784085605

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.