He enlisted in the Army the following year, serving as a military policeman at Fort Jay on Governor's Island in New York Harbor.
[5] After his discharge in 1952, Hoch remained in New York City for another year, working at Pocket Books, Inc..[2] Returning to New Rochelle, he began working at Hutchins Advertising Company as a copy and public relations writer, in which capacity he remained for roughly 15 years, until transitioning to strictly fiction writing in 1968.
His stories are regarded as very well written and are usually tightly plotted puzzles, with carefully and fairly presented clues, both physical and psychological.
Therefore, in one person's opinion, the prize should go to the very first story, "Murder Offstage," a short-short by Edward D. Hoch; Satan himself could be proud of its ingenuity.
In the early 1980s, Hoch outlined three paperback original mystery novels with Otto Penzler which were then ghost-written by other authors.
Nick Velvet is a professional thief for hire, with a peculiar specialty: for a flat fee, he steals only objects of negligible apparent value.
Since his first appearance in EQMM in September 1966, he has stolen such things as an old spiderweb (which he was then obliged to replace), a day-old newspaper, and a used teabag.
In 1980 he raised it to $25,000 at the urging of his long-time girlfriend Gloria (who met Nick in 1965 when he was burgling her New York apartment); in the 21st century his fee has risen to $50,000.
The Nick Velvet caper stories generally combine a near-impossible theft with the mystery of why someone would pay $20,000 to have an apparently valueless item stolen.
Although Nick often appears as devoid of curiosity as his targets are of value, circumstances usually force him to identify his clients' true motives, making him as much of a detective as Hoch's more conventional characters.
The fundamental immorality of Nick's chosen profession is frequently offset by the larger justice resulting from his detective work.
A Nick Velvet story, "The Theft of the Circus Poster" in May 1973, began Hoch's unbroken string of monthly appearances in EQMM.
Captain Jules Leopold is a police detective, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad of the police department for the fictional city of Monroe, Connecticut, a city apparently modeled on Hoch's own home town, Rochester, New York, in Monroe County, New York.
The story outcomes usually depend on the deductive ability of Leopold and his comrades rather than on straightforward police work, and sometimes feature impossible crimes and locked rooms.
The Leopold stories best illustrate one of the attractions of Hoch's series tales: The characters age and alter realistically with time.
Sam Hawthorne tries to live a quiet life in the fictional New England town of Northmont, but wherever he goes someone always seems to die in a most improbable way.
In "The Problem of Suicide Cottage" (EQMM, July 2007), it is revealed old Sam is 80 years old, and has a daughter named Samantha.
Jeffery (sometimes Jeffrey) Rand is a code and cipher expert, formerly with the Department of Concealed Communications of British intelligence.
After he left Concealed Communications, many of his stories involved his half-Egyptian, half-Scots wife, Lella Gaad, who Rand met in "The Spy and The Nile Mermaid".
Alexander Swift, one of Hoch's later creations, is an intelligence agent for General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.