The New York Times-20080124-Edward D- Hoch- 77- Writer Of Over 900 Mystery Stories- -Obituary -Obit--

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Edward D. Hoch, 77, Writer Of Over 900 Mystery Stories; [Obituary (Obit)]

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Edward D. Hoch, a crime writer who during his lifetime was widely believed to have been the world's most prolific author of short mysteries, died last Thursday at his home in Rochester. He was 77.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Patricia, said. The former Patricia McMahon, she is his only immediate survivor.

Over five decades, Mr. Hoch published more than 900 mystery stories in periodicals like Argosy, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and The Saint Mystery Magazine. For the last 35 years he was a fixture of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which published a story of his every month from 1973 until his death.

A past president of the Mystery Writers of America, Mr. Hoch (pronounced Hoke) was one of the rare short-story writers to survive the demise of the pulp magazines, whose heyday had come and gone by the late 1950s. He did so partly through sheer torrential volume: his work appeared in print so often that some readers assumed Mr. Hoch was actually a conglomerate.

In 2001 Mr. Hoch was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America, one of a tiny handful of short-story writers to be so honored. He won an Edgar Award from the organization in 1968 for his story The Oblong Room, about a campus murder with religious overtones.

Considered a master of the puzzle mystery, Mr. Hoch played myriad variations on the locked-room theme. In his story The Vanishing of Velma, a woman disappears from a moving Ferris wheel. In The Problem of the Candidate's Cabin, a murder takes place in a locked cabin containing only the lately departed and a caged chimpanzee.

Mr. Hoch wrote a few novels, among them three science-fiction titles starring a team of futuristic sleuths: The Transvection Machine (Walker, 1971), The Fellowship of the Hand (Walker, 1973) and The Frankenstein Factory (Warner, 1975). Under the name Ellery Queen he wrote The Blue Movie Murders (Lancer Books, 1972).

From 1976 to 1981 Mr. Hoch edited the anthology series Best Detective Stories of the Year (Dutton); from 1982 to 1995 he edited The Year's Best Mystery & Suspense Stories (Walker).

Edward Dentinger Hoch was born in Rochester on Feb. 22, 1930, and began writing crime fiction as a teenager. He studied at the University of Rochester before publishing his first story, Village of the Dead, in the December 1955 issue of Famous Detective Stories.

To populate his vast fictional universe Mr. Hoch created more than two dozen series characters. These included Captain Leopold, a police detective; Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small-town family practitioner; Simon Ark, a 2,000-year-old Coptic priest; and Alexander Swift, an agent for Gen. George Washington who must root out a potential traitor in the American fort at West Point, N.Y. (Hint: The fort is commanded by a man named Benedict Arnold.)

Perhaps Mr. Hoch's most popular sleuth was Nick Velvet, a professional thief engaged to steal a bewildering array of things for his clients. These included an ashtray, a cobweb, a canceled stamp, a dead houseplant, a used tea bag, a sliver of soap, a ball of twine, a bingo card, an empty paint can, a Thanksgiving turkey, a blue-ribbon pie, a bathroom scale, a bald man's comb, an ostrich, a skunk, a major-league baseball team and -- in perhaps the most blatantly criminal act of all -- an overdue library book.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Edward D. Hoch (PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHEW PEYTON/GETTY IMAGES, 2003)