All but Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne

Fans of classic mysteries interested in howdunit as well as whodunit will relish MWA Grand Master Hoch’s fourth collection of ingenious impossible crime stories (after 2014’s Nothing Is Impossible). The 15 tales are set between 1936 and 1940. Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small-town Connecticut doctor, has a habit of encountering seeming impossibilities, such as a baby who vanishes in church right before her baptism (“The Problem of the Country Church”), to which Hawthorne is a witness. “The Second Problem of the Covered Bridge” in which a man is shot at close range while alone at the center of a covered bridge, “with more than two hundred people watching,” reprises aspects of the very first case the astute amateur sleuth cracked. As always, Hoch (1930–2008) expertly conceals the keys to the answers in plain sight and grounds the improbable situations by peopling the stories with realistic characters and injecting humor (a witness to the infant’s disappearance comments that the ceremony was routine, except that “the baby doesn’t usually disappear”). John Dixon Carr biographer Douglas G. Greene supplies an appreciative introduction. (July)