How do you create an Occult Detective in the last half of the 20th century? Edward D. Hoch found an old solution to a new problem of the rationality of today. He created a “false monster” detective. Like the writers of the original Gothic novels (such as Ann Radcliffe) he explains his monsters and miracles away…
Hoch created a new ghost-breaker from the left-overs of the pulps, Simon Ark. Fantastical in appearance, Ark’s nameless Watson describes the ghost-breaker as a Coptic priest–a schism group from the Roman Catholic Church, based in Egypt, the Copts believed that Christ had only one divine nature–possibly 1500 years old, though in apperance only “…tall and heavy-set; yet he carried himself with an ease and dignity that often made people forget his physical features and remember only the overpowering persuasion of his manner.” He can often be heard making cryptic remarks like “‘Would you believe it if I told you I walked the sands of Africa with Augustine, and talked wiyh Aquinas on the road to Naples, and visited John of the Cross in the monastery at Ubeda?'”
In one story we are given a possible origin of the stranger known as Simon Ark. Father Hadeen retells a parable told to him by Simon.
“…He spoke of other things this afternoon, of a strange Coptic priest in the first century after Christ, who wrote a gospel glorifying the Lord. The words were devout but hardly divinely inspired. The Fathers of the Church denounced it as a fraud, and the Coptic priest lost everything. He was in a unique if impossible situation–his writings had been holy praises to God, worthy of a place in Heaven, but the deceit he’d used in circulating them as a fifth gospel made such a reward impossible. It was a situation even baffling for the Almighty, and this man could be sebt neither to Heaven nor Hell. He was doomed to walk the earth forever, until such time as God would decide his fate.”
The book of this sinner-saint has served in a vastly altered form, possibly making Ark the author of The Shepard of Hermas. In “City of Brass” he also claims to have written “…a brief little book … on witchcraft.”
His quest, Ark explains himself, “‘I am just a man…A man from another age. You would not be interested in where I came from, or in what my mission is. I need only tell you that I am searching for the ultimate evil–for Satan himself…'” Despite the unusual dressings, all stock props that would have fit nicely into Weird Tales, the solution is ultimately earthly. Satan only ever appears in the form of evil men.
The first Ark tale is “The Village of the Dead” (Famous Detective Stories, February 1955), appeatring only months after the demise of Weird Tales. The plot involves an entire village of Gidaz that got up one night and walked over a cliff, killing everyone. The nameless Watson, a reporter, and a college girl, Shelly, who had left Gidaz for the big city, quickly fall in with Ark in pursuing the mysterious Axidus, a priest who commanded the hearts and souls of the community. Ultimately a terrestrial solution and villain is found, chased and killed by accidentally falling from the same cliff. The reporter marries Shelly and never sees Ark again…
Until “The Witch is Dead” (Famous Detective Stories, April 1956), followed in the same magazine in 1956. Hoch back-tracks (perhaps never expecting to write another Ark story with the reporter as narrator) and has the Watson meet up with Simon Ark again several years later. This time it is a mysterious fortune-teller and a girls’ college that catches Simon Ark’s attention. The strange Mother Fortune, a witch and seeress, has cast a curse on the Hudsonville College for expelling her twenty-five years earlier for smoking. The woman is ridiculous but the girls of the school have fallen ill while the instructors have not. Later, the witch is found burned to death while her trailer is untouched. The reporter thinks it is spontaneous combustion but Ark quickly shows otherwise, trapping a faculty member in his plot to steal uranium isotopes. The poisonous metal was hidden in the drain of the school pool, causing the girls’ sickness.
“The Hoofs of Satan” (Famous Detective Stories, February 1956) breaks the mold and introduces a new Watson for Simon, in Inspector Ashly. The location is also changed from the US to London. But most striking is the lack of a narrator, since the story is told in the third person. Very likely this story was the first written, an experiment, and the only Ark story to be told in this manner. Also making this theory likely is that the chronology of the tale does not fit in with the later reporter-told stories. The plot concerns strange footprints in the snow, according to local legend, those of the Devil. Ark, along with Ashly, uncovers a murdered man and an unusual method of getting rid of the body. The plot is obviously inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story,”The Devil’s Foot”.
“The Vicar of Hell” (Famous Detective Stories, August 1956) brings both the unnamed newspaper man and Ashly back together to track down a mysterious tome in London. While pursuing the ritual murderers, the newspaper man falls for a gorgeous gun-slinging gal and is only turned from the path of adultery by Simon’s intervention. Of all the Ark stories to date , “The Vicar of Hell” is the most pulpy, with a mob of Satanists and secret rites, and perhaps one of the few to have anything to do with the real supernatural, even if it is only as earthly as cultists. Watson is turned from the path of evil and returns to his wife, Shelly of “The Village of the Dead”.
“The Hour of None” (Double-Action Detective & Mystery, Fall 1957) is another homage tale. This time it is G. K. Chesterton who is the inspiration, as this tale of murder in a monastery in Father Brown fashion. Hoch even tips his hat in describing the denizens of Saint John of the Cross: “The fat little monk who met us at the door…was the embodiment of all Friar Tucks and Father Browns who had ever walked the pages of literature…”.
The plot of “The Hour of None” concerns a priest pushed from a bell-tower by a fellow inmate from a Communist Chinese prison. The supernatural elements are all in the cryptic words of Ark and not much in the evidence. The murderer turns out to be human enough and the reader is never pushed too hard to believe any monster is present. This will be the trend of future tales as Hoch falls more into a mystery writers track and less and less a pulp-writer’s.
“The Judges of Hades” (Crack Detective & Mystery Stories, February 1957) is a good story for character information. The nameless Watson returns to his hometown of Maples Shades, Indiana when his father and sister are killed in the same car crash but in separate vehicles. We get to watch as the man meets his estrangled aunt and uncle, and relives memories of a father he hated. Shelly comes along for the fun and eventually Simon Ark is called in to explain the odd deaths. Again, no real supernatural events are offered but Hoch does tie in the three Judges of Hades in nicely though metaphorically.
“Sword For a Sinner” (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1959) sees Simon and his nameless helper back in the houses of God. This time it is the dark side of the monastry they experience, as a man is murdered while engaging in mock cruxification. Hoch uses the strange practise of reliving Christ’s agony to set a mystery puzzle: how does a killer recognize the victim when there are a dozen men with covered heads?
Ark’s newspaperman assistant is not left idle while Simon puzzles that one out. “I always hated chasing around on missions for him like some third-rate Watson, but I could see I had little choice,” he complains in a different story. This time he’s willing as the atmosphere of the supplicants disagrees with him. Instead, he watches in a sleazy roadhouse called The Oasis. It is here he is once again half-tempted to break his wedding vows when he meets Vicky Nelson, “…good-looking blonde…twenty-five or younger…”
Hoch brings the supernatural back into the story with the climax. With the help of Father Hadden, brother to one of the clergy in “The Hour of None” and a medium, Ark stages a fake seance which snares the only person who could recognize the victim without seeing his face: his wife.
“City of Brass” (The Saint Mystery Library, September 1959) is Simon Ark’s magnus opus, a short novel set in a one-industy town, Baine City. The nameless Watson is pulled in by having an acquaintance with John Mahon, brother-in-law to Cathy Clark, a woman murdered viciously. Simon and his assistant get a frosty reception as they move through the City of Brass, trying to find the connection between Foster Baine, monarch of the company, Zenny, a hot-rodding punk and former boyfriend of Cathy’s, and a Dr. Wilber.
It is the character of Wilber that supplies the only supernatural element, and that is weak at best. Wilber is a research scientist from Baine University, who is conducting confidential experiments in hereditry. Watson accuses him of wanting to bring Cathy Clark back to life when he sees her stroking the hair on her corpse.
The story ends with a long digression into a false supernatural occurance, stigmata. Foster Baine’s mother is locked away on the old family homestead because her hands and feet have the wounds of Christ and lives entirely on the nourishment of daily Commumion. It is this little family secret that Dr. Wilbur is working secretly on for the Baines. Simon Ark quickly puts an end to the old woman’s delusions, exposing her falsehood. She has been injecting turpentine under the skin and getting food from her nursemaid.
This episode has little to do with the solution of the crime (which frankly was obvious one third of the way into the tale) which has been done by the newspaperman’s old acquaintance, Henry Mahon. His wife was killed by her own sister who took her identity. Dying her hair and avoiding old acquaintances she posed as her sister to get at the large inheritance she had been denied.
As Simon Ark stories go, “City of Brass” is over-long and tame on supernatural weirdness. Perhaps Hoch wanted to see if he could write an Ark novel, but this story lags–unusual for Hoch, with his suscinct and quick-moving style. He uses descriptive flourishes such as “Strange, city strange, darkness settling slowly like fog over streets so quiet…”, like bad Raymond Chandler, it jars the reader from the story.
Hoch does end the book on one last Poe/Doyle-like bit. Simon Ark finally reveals to his Watson the strange but failed experiments of Dr. Wilbur by mentioning the mysterious name of Mirza Ali Akbar.
“He was a man from India, a hundred years ago, who was interested in the possibilities of breeding large female apes with human males…”
I remember the ape in Wilber’s laboratory and his conversation with us that first day, and I asked no more questions. Whatever the truth of the matter was, I felt I already knew too much… Many Simon Ark stories appeared in the pages of EQMM but after these initial tales, Ark becomes even less fantastic, just another Hoch character alongside Inspector Leopold, Ben Snow and others. The pulp has been nearly completely washed away though the slight tang of spookiness remains, if only in Ark’s unexplained origins. It has all become an intellectual game, like most mystery fiction, as we wait to see how Hoch will explain seemingly impossible clues. Perhaps Ark’s fans will one day see the fulfilment of these cryptic prophecy: “‘I know it seems fantastic sir, but I believe Simon Ark is searching for Satan. I believe he has been searching for a long, long time. I wonder what will happen when they meet…'”
