Rochester, NY-January 17th, 2008 - On Thursday, January 17, 2008, Edward D. Hoch, a Grand Master and past president of the Mystery Writers of America, died of a heart attack at his home in Rochester, New York. The wave of sadness that swept over the mystery community at the news was not only for the loss of one of the field's premier writers but for the passing of a truly good and gentle man.

The qualities of character for which we mourn Ed were directly reflected in his career as a writer. Among the flood of e-mails of condolence EQMM received was one from author Richard Lupoff, in which he said, "Every story Ed ever wrote manifested his innate goodness." How true that statement rings to me, Ed's editor of nearly seventeen years (and 188 stories). One can see Ed's genuine liking for his fellow man in virtually all of the characters he created: Even his villains are seldom entirely damnable.

Throughout the latter part of his career, Ed could not escape comments about the extraordinary number of stories he'd had published (around 950 in the end), or questions about how he could possibly come up with so many ideas. The answer to that question lies partly in the life he livedâ€"a quiet, well-organized, and habit-governed life, which left his mind free to configure the things he saw and read in endlessly clever and imaginative ways. He was very fortunate, too, in his wife Patricia, to whom he was devoted. Pat supported his commitment to the writer's life, and often partnered with him when he took on other responsibilities in the field.

Part of being a writer, for Ed, was serving the community of writers to which he belonged. From 1982 to 1995 Ed and Pat read every crime and mystery short story published in order to ensure that selections for The Years Best Mystery and Suspense Stories, which Ed edited during those years, were fairly made. When that series ceased publication, Ed was frequently asked to serve on awards committees, and never refused the call.

Ed was a winner of many awards himself, of course: an Edgar and two Anthony Awards for best short story, lifetime achievement awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, and most recently, the EQMM Readers Award, which he learned he had won shortly before his death.

Ed Hoch's long association with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine goes back to 1962 when he first made a sale to editor Fred Dannay. Since 1973 he has had a story in every single issue of the magazine. Most of his series stories have run exclusively in EQMM, and he continued to provide new cases for ten of his most popular characters right up to the present. They include his lovable thief Nick Velvet, who found his way onto French television in the 1970s, impossible-crime solver Dr. Sam Hawthorne, and the hero of his first published short story, the occult Simon Ark. A number of collections of Hoch stories, both series and non-series, have seen print in the U.S., and others have been published, in translation, in countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, Germany, and Sweden.

Short story writers seldom develop the kind of committed fan base that novelists do, but there Ed was an exception. Fans from unexpected places such as Iceland wrote to him to say they collected his work, and his bibliography has long been a labor of love of collector June Moffatt.

EQMM received many letters from Ed's fans over the years, often from readers to whom his series characters had become as friends. Those letters may be the most fitting tribute of all, for there's a lot of Ed in the characters he created, and he himself was the most loyal of friends. Like so many others who had the privilege of knowing Ed, I miss him already, as both a friend and a writer, and maybe, in the end, the writer and the friend cannot be separated. For we'll always be able to find Ed in the wealth of stories he left behind.

- Janet Hutchings