One day in May 2006, I wrote a letter to Mr. Hawke. This was the first time he received an email from a Chinese reader.Now, all the protagonists written by the king of short reasoning in the world have finally appeared in China. While I am excited, I also feel a little sad in my heart——because Mr. Hawke passed away on January 17, 2008 . Hawke's full name is Edward Dantinger Hawke. He was born in Rochester, New York on February 22, 1930. His father, El G. Hawke, is the vice president of the bank, and his mother, Alice Dantinger Hawke, is a housewife. .Hawke liked reading reasoning since he was a child. The first reasoning novel he read was "The Mystery of Chinese Orange" (The Mystery of Chinese Orange, 1934) by Ellery Queen, although Hawke himself thought it was not Quinn's best novel. Good work, but this does not prevent him from loving this unique genre of literature.Hawke began to try to write detective stories in high school, and this habit continued until his two years (1947-1949) at the University of Rochester.

Beginning in 1949, he worked as a researcher at the Rochester Public Library, and at the same time joined the American Detective Writers Association (MWA) chapter as a member, and went to New York to attend parties from time to time.At the end of the following year, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to serve in New York.This undoubtedly created convenience for him to participate in the activities of the American Detective Writers Association. In the past two years, he became friends with many famous figures at the time, including Frederick Dannay (Frederick Dannay), King of the Chamber of Secrets John John Dickson Carr, master of suspense Cornell Woolrich, MWA's first female president Helen McCloy and magicians author Clayton Law Clayton Rawson et al.Also during this period, Hawke established a good relationship with the famous editor Hans S. Santesson (Hans S. Santesson), which laid the groundwork for Hawke's future full-time creative career.

After leaving the army, Hawke first found a job keeping accounts for goods at the Pocket Book Company in New York.A year later, with a rise of just three dollars a week, he returned to Rochester in January 1954 and took a job in copyright and public relations at the Hutchins Advertising Agency.These work experiences are more obviously projected on Hawke's first detective, the narrator "I" of the Simon Yaker series. On September 26, 1955, Hawke's short story "Village of Dead" (Village of Dead) was published in "Famous Detective Stories" (Famous Detective Stories), which was his first officially published detective story, inspired by 1953 A date he had with his girlfriend last summer.And Simon Yaker, who played the role of detective in this story, has since become the most important and "long-lived" serial detective in Hawke's works.

Between 1956 and 1967, Hawke published 22 novels. In 1968, he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Detective Writers Association of America for The Oblong Room, and he also won a novel contract, completing the novel Shattered the following year. Shattered Raven.Hawke thus decided to turn to full-time writing. Since 1973, Hawke's works have been published in mainstream reasoning magazines such as EQMM (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) and AHMM (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) published. After more than 30 years, Hawke continued to write, and the number of his short stories finally ushered in the thousandth mark in the new century.

To count the detectives in Hawke's works, hands and feet may not be enough, so here we only select the most dazzling protagonists to give a brief introduction (this Jilin publication almost covers these series). Simon Ark (Simon Ark): over 2000 years old, a Christian priest in Egypt at the beginning of the Era. His main mission in the world is to find and destroy the devil. This series is related to metaphysics, Satan, witchcraft or impossible events , but by the end of the story, these cases will be solved in a logical way.The last article by Simon Acker is "Christmas Eggs (Temporary Translation)" (Christmas Egg) published in the January 2009 issue of EQMM. This series has a total of 62 articles.

Sam Hawthorne (Sam Hawthorne): a practicing doctor in North Hills, New England, who specializes in secret rooms and impossible crimes. The background of the story is set in the 1920s and 1940s. He first appeared in "The Mystery of the Bridge" published in the December 1974 issue of EQMM (The Problem of Covered Bridge), the last one is "The Problem of the Secret Patient" (The Problem of the Secret Patient) published in the May 2008 issue of EQMM, a total of 72 articles in this series. Ben Snow (Ben Snow): Western fast gunner detective, although the novel has reasoning elements, but due to the relationship between the characters, readers can often see gun battles and action scenes, the background time is set between 1880 and 1910.The earliest detective story was "The Valley of Arrows" in The Saint Mystery Magazine in 1961, and the last was "Ms. Sheen's Gold" in the July 2008 issue of EQMM. (Temporary translation)" (Madam Sing's Gold), this series has a total of 44 articles.

Jeffery Rand: Jeffery Rand is a cryptographer and former British Secret Communications Service agent.The Rand series always has a foreign flavor, basically related to codes or espionage.The first appearance was "The Spy Who Did Nothing" published in the May 1965 issue of EQMM, and the last article was "The Alexandrian Solution" (The Alexandrian Solution) in the December 2008 issue. A total of 84 articles. Michael Vlado: The main character, Detective Michael Vlado, is the king of a Romanian gypsy tribe with the catchphrase "I'm just a poor peasant."The creation of this series started relatively late. In 1984, Hawke was invited by Bill Pronzini (Bill Pronzini, the winner of the Master Award of the American Association of Reasoning Writers in 2008, who created the famous private detective "No Name") to write for "Folk Detective". (The Ethnic Detectives), published Valado's debut work: "The Luck of A Gypsy", and the last article was "Gypsy Gold (Temporary translation)" published in the December 2007 issue of EQMM )” (The Gypsy Gold), there are 30 articles in this series.

Inspector Leopold (Inspector Leopold): The chief of the serious crimes department of a police department in a city in Connecticut. In Hawke's short story series, he appears the most times, and is also the only series written by Hawke with more than 100 stories , the background setting is relatively modern, and most of the early works have the characteristics of police procedural novels, while the later period is slightly more interesting, and the number of impossible crimes has increased. Hawke has created nearly a thousand short mystery novels in his life, and produced one story in two weeks on average. It may not be an exaggeration to call it a story maker!Still, Hawke's writing is surprisingly uniformly high, with almost every story both entertaining and unexpected.After Hawke's death, many readers even expressed that they lost interest in renewing EQMM.

What is the secret?Regarding this issue, it can be summed up in two words: one is to pay attention to everything; the other is to be eclectic. Hawke is a person with great curiosity and a strong thirst for knowledge.A large part of the time is spent on reading newspapers, magazines or online news every day (this is of course after the popularization of computers).And the result of paying attention to everything is to accumulate a lot of fresh and interesting background information, which can be easily used in actual creation. For example, there is a pair of relatively new detective partners in his works (first appeared in EQMM in 2002 to meet readers), called Stanton (Stanton) and Ives (Ives), they are lovers, from Princeton University They want to travel to Europe after graduation, but they don't have the money to afford the high air ticket costs. At this time, such a good thing as free air tickets appears, at the cost of including a piece of goods from the client in their luggage.Curious readers can't help but ask, is there such a job in the world?But as it happens, the story was inspired by a report that Hawke saw in the New York Times.The report described that some young people can enjoy the benefits of ultra-low discount air tickets by undertaking the small cargo consignment business entrusted by the company.

Hawke is an American, but many of his stories take place in exotic regions, such as the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. Following Hawke's stories, readers seem to have traveled around the world again and again.What is particularly amazing is that many of the scenes in these stories can only be written if they have been to the scene.Therefore, readers naturally guess whether he loves to travel and has been to many places around the world.In fact, Hawke goes to very few places every year, mainly in the United States and Canada, and occasionally goes to Finland and other Nordic countries.

And those lifelike descriptions benefited from his habit of reading Guide Books, especially those picture books with vivid illustrations, which provided great help for his writing. Although Hawke never had the opportunity to travel to China during his lifetime, he still set some stories in China. For example, in the August 2007 issue of EQMM, an article "China Blues (Temporary Translation)" (China Blues) was published, and Stan Dunton and Ives traveled thousands of miles to a village by the Yellow River.As soon as the story begins, the two are already at Beijing Capital International Airport!As early as 1989, the October issue of EQMM let Jeffrey Rand go on an adventure trip to Hong Kong. The name of the story was "The Spy and the Geomancers" (The Spy and the Geomancers). Hawke's stories can always create two worlds, the detective's adventure world and the real flowery world-no matter what kind of preference readers are, it is hard not to be moved by this wonderful feeling that is both real and illusory. And when it comes to eclecticism, it is Hawke's weapon against the aging of classical reasoning. Detective novels have been developed for more than 160 years. The tricks have been exhausted, the characters are all the same, and sometimes even the lines seem familiar.Readers can't help asking, where is the future of detective fiction?Hawke used Dr. Sam Hawthorne's Impossible Crime series as an example to briefly analyze such issues. Some writers represented by John Dickson Carr once pointed out that the types of solutions to the secret room problem must be limited, that is to say, readers only need to use the exhaustive method to find the correct solution.In order for classical reasoning to continue to develop new vitality in the contemporary era, the connotation of tricks needs to be expanded, and certain elements that are not directly related to murder methods must become the organic composition of tricks. The first task of a detective novel writer is to tell a good story, followed by reasoning and detective.Only when the trick reaches a high degree of integration with the story can its original appearance be diluted.Therefore, stories are more important than tricks, which is beyond doubt for the creation of mystery novels in the new century.Almost all of the Sam Hawthorne series were born in accordance with this concept. Hawke's skillful skill in putting old wine in new bottles is amazing.Therefore, most of Hawke's stories are conceived and completed first, and then given a reasonable answer. For Hawke, the wine can be sweet, but the bottle must be beautiful. The Nick Velvet series exemplifies this idea best, and before thinking about "what happened again" or "what clever tricks were used", the first thing the reader should ask is: Why does Nick steal things.The thief's task is to steal things. This is a simple truth like the rising and setting of the sun, but Hawke just created a horizon in a ghostly manner. The changed viewing angle really makes every day a brand new "day": Thief Nick only steals things of little value—used teabags, faded flags, toy mice, clear water from a pool...everything, and everything. If the story itself isn't interesting enough, Hawke creates some startling new mysteries from time to time.He wrote a famous short story entitled "The Long Way Down" (The Long Way Down, 1965), which was not only selected into the classic anthology "The Locked Room Reader" (The Locked Room Reader) in 1968, but also adapted into the last century. An episode of the prime 1970s TV show "McMillan and Wife."The story is about a man who jumps out of a skyscraper window, but the street below is full of traffic and business as usual.Just when people thought that there was a supernatural event that evaporated out of thin air, the man who jumped off the building finally landed and died with a bang four hours later!The creativity and solution of the story are amazing. It can be said that Hawke was born entirely for short reasoning.His story creativity and puzzle design are like new branches that continue to open, making the old tree of classical reasoning green like spring. Hawke is talented as a writer, but he is a very humble and easy-going old man in life, so he is quite popular in the reasoning circle.After his death, many famous writers and editors wrote articles one after another to reminisce, and there were more readers, who shared their communication with the master on the forum like a treasure. When I was invited to write this introduction, I lamented how time flies while flipping through the correspondence records with Mr. Hawke.This time last year, Rochester had just started to snow and the weather was getting a little colder.In the blink of an eye, it is another winter, and the wind is blowing in Shanghai—the years are long, and the clothes are thin. Fortunately, Edward Hawke left so many good words for readers, enough to weave a warm and long red On the blanket, the colorful detectives walked by one by one, and the stars were shining-this night, there was nothing missing.

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