While a vast majority of Ed Hoch's stories were mysteries, he enjoyed horror and science fiction. Of his nine-hundred-plus output, he wrote several handfuls of horror and science fiction stories that appeared in various magazines and anthologies. It could be argued that his first published story, "Village of the Dead" (which appeared in the December 1955 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Detective Stories), is as much horror as it is a mystery. In that story, the mass suicide of an entire village is investigated by Simon Ark, a mysterious-possibly two-thousand year old-Coptic Priest.

Here, then, are 29 tales of the future, the fantastic, and the improbable by a master of the craft: Edward D. Hoch, writer extraordinaire