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Simon Ark

"Village of the Dead" (Nov 2, 2003) From the February 1955 issue of FAMOUS DETECTIVE STORIES, this was the first in the Simon Ark series by Edward D. Hoch. There were at least forty stories in the series, which appeared in various mystery magazines, including CRACK DETECTIVE (not what it sounds like!), up until 2001. That's quite a career for a detective with not much personality, no gunslinging prowess or prizefighting skills, and a laidback manner that makes Mr Rogers look all worked up. It's a mystery to me why the Simon Ark tales were popular for so long, and yet I do enjoy them myself. What's intriguing are the little clues about Ark's shadowy past which are dropped a wee bit at a time in each story. Maybe if you went through the entire canon and wrote down each brief hint about Ark, they would fit together into a stunning revelation. This haunting feeling that there is something momentous just under the surface gives the stories much of their mystique. Ark is an occult investigator in the honorable tradition of John Silence, Jules de Grandin and Ray Stantz. Reportedly, he is a former Coptic priest roughly fifteen hundred years old, given a divine mandate to wander the earth fighting satanic evil wherever it raises its unlovely head. Although he can't hurl fireballs or read minds, Ark does all right with his esoteric knowledge and a few well-chosen talismans. Of course, he does have a LOT of experience, which always helps. In "Village of the Dead", our unnamed narrator first encounters Ark in connection with the Gidaz Horror ("At least that was the name the newspapers gave it during those early days when the story first shocked the world"). Seventy-three people, the entire population of the remote village of Gidaz, have been found lying dead at the bottom of a hundred foot cliff. There's no sign of how it happened, food is still on the tables in their homes, no notes or messages were left. This understandably gets the newspapers aroused and reporters from all over the state swarm onto the site like a metaphor. Our storyteller is poking around the now deserted village when he meets a quiet stranger. A tall, heavyset man, whose face on close examination shows fine lines of great age but who doesn't look at first to be particularly old, the man introduces himself as Simon Ark, and claims to be just someone whose hobby is "investigating any strange or unexplained events in the world" (*X FILES music in background*). The two do some snooping and hook up with a young woman who had left Gidaz years before but who has come back because of the tragedy. It turns out there was this bizarre charismatic cult leader named Axidus causing trouble in the area. The solution to what caused the mass stampede over the cliff turns out to be pretty prosaic and not altogether convincing. The faint hints of some evil force from centuries past resurfacing aren't developed and Simon Ark's big confrontation with Axidus is ambiguous enough to have little impact. All in all, the story misses almost every chance to be dramatic or compelling; it's told in such a dry understated style (with minimum description or color) that the words just about evaporate as you read them. Everyone talks like a drowsy Jack Webb. It doesn't help that Hoch seems to be infatuated with the ellipse and a great number of sentences end in three periods. This has a tranquilizing effect on the reader, instead of invoking a sense of unease. "Village of the Dead" gets the Simon Ark series off to a clunky start.

"Sword For a Sinner" (July 17, 2002) From the October 1959 issue of THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE this is one of the Simon Ark stories by Edward D. Hoch. Although not as widely known as he should be, Ark has had one of the longest running series in mystery or thriller fiction, and likely the longest by a single author. As far as I can find out, the first Simon Ark story was "Village of the Dead" in a 1955 issue of FAMOUS DETECTIVE STORIES, while the latest one was "The Scaring Bell" in the May 2001 ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE. *yike* (I guess this ties Sax Rohmer, who cranked out Fu Manchu books from 1912 to 1959.) Hoch is an enormously prolific writer, with hundreds of short stories in dozens of magazines and anthologies. The Ark stories have a very sparse, understated prose style that is clear and perhaps a bit too dry. In "Sword For a Sinner', he delivers a perfectly enjoyable little puzzle that doesn't pull any unfair last minute switches. This time, Simon Ark is initially interested in the problem of Father Haddon, who has recently developed the unsettling gift of communication with the spirits of the recently deceased. Then to really complicate things, there's a murder at the nearby headquarters of the Brotherhood of Penitentes, where overly devout sinners worship by being tied with horsehair cords to wooden crosses and hanging there to atone. Well. One of them has been found with a sword sticking out of his chest, the local sheriff has already decided who did it, and the mystery unrolls.... Most of the stories in this series have some sort of supernatural tinge to them, ranging from demonic possession to witchcraft to the undead, with Ark relentlessly seeking out these manifestations. In each story, we get a tantalyzing clue about the ghostbreaker's history, and gradually we can piece them together. Ark doesn't cast spells as such, but he does speak with a certain spiritual authority and certainty. In "Sword For a Sinner", we get a hint of his origin story but significantly, he relates it to the psychic cleric to make a point and he doesn't give it as the unqualified scoop. We have heard several times that the man who uses the name Simon Ark is over fifteen hundred years old, that he was a Coptic priest in Egypt a century after the Crucifixion. According to the anecdote he tells, he was a over-enthusiastic evangelist who wrote a spurious Fifth Gospel and tried to pass it off as genuine. "The words were devout but hardly divinely inspired. The Fathers of the Church denounced it as a fraud, and the Coptic priest lost everything." Because the fake Gospel was sincere and praiseworthy but had been falsely presented, there was a tricky theological problem. Apparently God judged that the priest deserved neither Heaven nor Hell and so Ark is cursed to live until his final fate can be decided. And so Simon Ark has wandered the earth ever since, seeking out and battling Satanic manifestations, apparently to earn his redemption. It's a haunting tale but in actuality, "pious fraud" was nothing rare. There were stacks of alleged Gospels never ruled canonical, not to mention all those fake pieces of the Cross, the fabricated Shrouds and the bones of various Saints. You might wonder why there aren't a hundred eternal wanderers like Simon Ark. Hmmm, maybe there are. In any case, the stories are certainly worth picking up if you see a collection. In 1971, there were two paperback with a handful of stories in each one, THE JUDGES OF HADES and THE CITY OF BRASS, and in the early 1980s there was a third collection, THE QUESTS OF SIMON ARK. The undying Coptic priest deserves a niche alongside his colleagues Jules de Grandin, John Silence and Morris Klaw.