History Literature / SimonArk

* PsychoPsychologist: In [[spoiler:"The Treasure of Jack the Ripper"]], the killer is a cold, emotionally distant and, as is ultimately revealed, deeply disturbed behavioural psychologist. Simon speculates that her mind was unbalanced discovering [[spoiler:she is a descendant of UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper]] when she was too young to properly process the information.

* ReligiousAndMythological ThemeNaming: In "The Unicorn's Daughter", the members of a commune all adopted the names of mythical creatures: Griffon, Phoenix, Chimera, etc. After the commune disbands, some of the members go back to their original names, while others legally change their surnames to the name of their mythical beast.

* ReligousAndMytologicalThemeNaming: In "The Unicorn's Daughter", the members of a commune all adopted the names of mythical creatures: Griffon, Phoenix, Chimera, etc. After the commune disbands, some of the members go back to their original names, while others legally change their surnames to the name of their mythical beast.

* SelfMadeOrphan: In "The Treasure of Jack the Ripper", having exposed the murderer, Simon goes to say that her first victims were almost certainly her parents, who died a house fire when she was 12.

* AnimalAssassin: In "The Treasure of Jack the Ripper", Simon's friend Ceritas Vats is sent a black widow spider inside a [[BookSafe hollowed-out book]]. Simon thinks it was intended more as a warning than a serious attempt on his life: pointing out the sender could just as easily a bomb inside the book as a spider.

Simon Ark looks to be an ordinary man in his sixties but he claims 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. The narrator of the Ark stories, Simon's publisher, believes that the immortality story is just something Simon came up with to make himself sound mysterious, but he does admit that Simon has not visably aged in all the years he has known him. The immortality element is not played up in any way and is just incidental to the stories.

The Simon Ark stories have supernatural themes, although the crimes in them are always found to have been committed by mundane means.

* SerialKillingsSpecificTarget: In "The Avenger from Outer Space", a killer makes a carefully planned series of murders look like the work of a local lunatic.

* HumanNotepad: In "The Treasure of Jack the Ripper", the mutilation of the[[DisposableSexWorker prostitutes]] murdered by UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper were actually [[SerialKillingsSpecificTarget a smokescreen to cover]] the theft of a patch of skin from each of them. These sections of skin each held a tattoo that, when stiched together, formed a TreasureMap.

* SpookySeance: In "A Sword for the Sinner", Simon holds a seance in which he impersonates the voice of the dead man to spook the killer into revealing themselves.

* ItWasHereTheWholeTime: In "The Vicar of Hell", Simon and his companions are searching for a surviving copy of a book which had been banned as blasphemous and all known copies destroyed. Although they cannot find it in the place where they have been told it is, Simon tells them its been here all along, and they have been staring at it. [[spoiler:It is literally on the walls. In Tudor times, destroyed books were not necessarily burned. They were sometimes flocked and turned into wallpaper. The odd patterns on the wallpaper that had been commented on earlier were actually the remains of the book's illustrations that were still visible.]]

* DoomsdayCult: The first Simon Ark story, "The Village of the Damned", deals with the mass suicide of members of a doomsday cult. In the anthology ''The Quests of Simon Ark'', Hoch notes that in 1955--several decades before the Jonestown massacre--several editors rejected the story as they considered the premise too far-fetched.