Because most of the tales take place in a single small town, the series has a larger-than-usual cast of recurring minor characters. Each Hawthorne story is a "locked room mystery", where an impossible crime occurs, usually a murder. The earlier tales of the series include one peculiar device: Each one ends with a hint about the next story's central puzzle, and each one begins with a reference to the previous story's hint. Such a device is sometimes inserted when stories are anthologized, to make them seem more like a continuous narrative, but it is very unusual in the initial publication of independent stories in a series. In "The Problem of Suicide Cottage" ("EQMM", July 2007), it is revealed old Sam is 80 years old, and has a daughter named Samantha. He is telling his stories in 1976, and was born in 1896. Jeffery (sometimes Jeffrey) Rand is a code and cipher expert, formerly with the Department of Concealed Communications of British intelligence. The Rand stories take place in exotic locations around the world, and frequently feature secret messages or codes. After he left Concealed Communications, many of his stories involved his half-Egyptian, half-Scots wife, Lella Gaad, who Rand met in "The Spy and The Nile Mermaid". Rand met another Hoch character, Michael Vlado, in "The Spy and the Gypsy". Simon Ark was the protagonist of Hoch's first published story and ultimately featured in 39 short stories, the best of which Hoch collected in 1984. Ark appears to be an ordinary man in his sixties, tall and stout, but many of the stories contain suggestions that he is actually over 2000 years old, a Coptic priest who travels the world looking for evil—specifically, Satan. It is said that he is cursed by God, that when Jesus carrying the cross wanted to rest, Ark refused him rest and in turn has never known rest himself, doomed to wander the globe forever (although at least one story suggests Ark was instead the author of a fraudulent gospel so pious that God was unable to punish him with hell or reward him with heaven, and so left him on the Earth instead). However the immortality element is not played up in any way and is just incidental. The Simon Ark stories have supernatural themes, although the crimes in them are always found to have been committed by mundane means. In the introduction to his 1984 collection, Hoch left the matter of Simon Ark's real nature a matter for the reader to ponder. The 1984 volume presents what Hoch deemed to be the nine best of the 39 stories that he devoted to Simon Ark; it concludes with a list of all 39 stories, giving details of their original publications.