The Siren's Call (1998) by Paul Halter

Paul Halter's Le cri de la siréne (The Siren's Call, 1998) is the 12th novel to feature his amateur criminologist, but chronologically, the first in the series as it recounts Dr. Alan Twist's maiden voyage as an investigator of "unusual facts and strange phenomena" – introducing him to the world of impossible crimes. The Siren's Call is the latest Halter novel to be translated and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International.

The Siren's Call takes place in September, 1922, in a wild, remote corner of Cornwall ("rich in legend and unexplained phenomena"). A then young Dr. Alan Twist had upon earning his doctorate abandoned the field of philosophy to dedicate himself to the study of the occult and investigating the paranormal. Like a John Bell or Alexander Hero. Dr. Twist has been invited by James Malleson to come down to his place, Moretonbury Manor, to investigate a haunted attic room.

Just like everyone involved in the Great War, James Malleson had a rough time in trenches, "the nightmare last three years" with "death as the constant companion," which is a torment apt to change a man – physically and mentally. A physical "souvenir" from the war is a disfiguring face scar and Malleson assumed his mind was still disturbed ("memories of the war haunt me...") when the nighttime phenomenon started. One year ago, Malleson began to hear noises and the sound of footsteps in the night. Always emanating from the so-called Rose Room in the attic that has been kept locked for the past twenty years. However, the ghostly occurrences became more tangible when it roused the entire household. Both his wife, Lydia, and her cousin, Edgar, heard the footsteps. Whoever is prowling around, the person appears to be trapped as he, or she, could not have escaped without being seen. So they move upstairs, unlocked and opened the door to make an astonishing discovery. An unused room locked for decades should have been coated in dust and cobwebs, but the room is "perfectly clean and orderly" with a cozy oil lamp burning on the bedside table and a strangely sweet, intoxicating scent pervading the room ("...as if a fairy had passed through it"). Naturally, the nocturnal visitor is nowhere to be found.

An excellent setup for a detective story presented as a ghostly yarn, but the plot immediately begins to twist and turn. Dr. Twist begins to get an idea why the region has "always been fertile grounds for legends, mysterious occurrences and supernatural apparitions" from "hellish hounds and headless horses" to "murmuring rivers, phantom cottages and pigs with wings."

First of all, there are the local legends of the Banshees whose screams spell doom to everyone who does not hear their gravely summons. Its victims from the region include Lydia's grandfather and father. Sir Charles Cranston, Lydia's grandfather, died mere hours after everyone at the pub heard the unearthly cries except him. And he died that very night in "unbelievable circumstances." Several people witnessed Sir Charles getting chased by a winged creature ending with a struggle at the top of an old tower, before shoving Sir Charles to his death. A similar fate was reserved for Lydia's father, Julian. So you would think this is going to be an impossible crime novel in the spirit of Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but very quickly becomes so much more reminiscent of John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938). Dr. Twist is presented with a much more grounded mystery, but with a much more horrifying explanation than what lurks behind the screams, winged creatures and the phantom footsteps.

Jason Malleson's identity has come under scrutiny as rumors has reached Scotland Yard that an impostor, or usurper, "took advantage of his comrade's death om the front lines to take his place." The police believes Malleson was replaced by his comrade-in-arms and "a crook well-known to the French Sûreté," Patrick Degan, who had a taste for good cognac, silk ties and had a habit of twirling his mustache – as well as being a formidable chess player. Nothing at all like the Jason Malleson who went to the front, but exactly described the Jason Malleson who returned. So the Yard dispatched Archibald Hurst to the place to carry out a discreet investigation and begins to work together with Dr. Alan Twist, which is the beginning of the collaborations and friendship. However, Malleson has been passing every conceivable test with flying colors for years. From following his wife, her cousin and their physician, Dr. Fred Cummings, to two intensive memory tests. The first is performed by the lexicographer and local eccentric, Jeremy Bell, who's a dead ringer for Dr. Gideon Fell and tutored a young Jason. The second test is carried out by Jason's cousin and childhood crony, William Lucas. They all conclude he must be the real Jason Malleson. You can almost call this plot-thread a psychological impossibility. A very well handled one at that!

This is still only the beginning as the Banshees started screaming again and someone died under practically identical circumstances as Sir Charles twenty years previously. And much more!

The Siren's Call has a brimming plot, spinning and bubbling like a witch's brew, which has an ending to match and came close to classic status, but its effect and impact got somewhat diminished by all the clutter and background noise. It would have been better if the story had mostly focused on the haunted attic room, James Malleson's identity and the two present-day murders should have been non-impossible crimes with the stories of screaming entities and winged creatures being nothing more than local color and gossip. It would eliminated the necessity of having to explain all those impossible deaths, screams and supernatural creatures with disappointing solutions, which now seriously took away from its brilliant core (SPOILER/ROT13: n ernyyl vatravbhf cynl ba gur zhygvcyr snyfr-vqragvgvrf jvgu bar bs gurz orvat (znrfgeb!) n “qbhoyr rkcbfher” pbzcyrgr jvgu n svany gjvfg). Something worthy of being called a genre classic and neo-GAD. But as it stands, The Siren's Call ended up being a tale of two detective stories: the detective story it could have been and the detective story we got. Regrettably, the detective story we got is not the classic it could have been. Regardless, a good, solid and intriguing mid-tier Halter novel telling the origin story of Dr. Twist and why he abandoned the paranormal to dedicate himself to criminal investigations.

A note for the curious: In Chapter 8 ("The Call of the Abyss"), Jeremy Bell asks Dr. Twist what attracts him to mysteries and answers it's the lure of the unknown and a love for puzzles. Jeremy Bell gives him this warning, "beware, Mr. Twist. Enigma is a dangerous mistress. She is diabolically attractive. Her perfume inflames men's spirits. She excites them and renders them eternal slaves to her charms, which she never reveals." Well, that pretty much explains everyone who's addicted to mysteries. From obsessing over detective stories to those who dive head first down the JFK rabbit hole.

The Mask of the Vampire (2014) by Paul Halter

Paul Halter is an unapologetic, traditionalist detective novelist, specialized in locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, who nonetheless has a bleak, cynical and modernist streak running through his novels and short stories – which are scattered across the good-bad spectrum. Halter can go from penning La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019), one of the best impossible crime novels of the 2010s, to churning out the amusing, but decidedly second-rate Le mystére de la Dame Blanche (The White Lady, 2020). So opinions among locked room fans also tend to be all over the place. Where we all can agree is that Halter has a lively imagination allowing him to cram his stories with entire parades of apparently supernatural occurrences and impossible murders. What he does with those miraculous crimes and how they're explained away is usually where his stories succeed or fall. And there are some in the middle, grayish area of the spectrum dividing opinions like the criminally underrated Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996).

The latest Paul Halter translation from the hands of John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, is one of those novels brimming with unearthly incidents and locked room murders. Halter delivers on practically all of them! 

Le masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2014), set in 1901, begins with two different stories that are slowly intertwined and twisted together. Firstly, Owen Burns tells his chronicler, Achilles Stock, he has been preoccupied by a remarkable case that was brought to his attention by Inspector Wedekind of Scotland Yard. An old, working class man, named John McCarthy, asked on his deathbed for a priest and Father Donovan answered the call. Whatever had weight on McCarthy's conscience, Father Donovan took that secret to the grave as he was run over by a carriage on his way home. McCarthy died several hours later. So there was nothing too extraordinary about "an old man dying on the one hand" and "a simple traffic accident on the other," except an unfortunate coincidence, but a piece of paper found on the priest reveals a potential link to a 5-year-old, unsolved murder – eulogized by Burns as "a locked room crime of the very first order." An elderly, reclusive woman, Violet Starling, who dabbled in spiritualism was found strangled in her first-floor flat in "a hermetically sealed room" with the door and windows locked and bolted on the inside. It was the victim's name that was written on the piece of paper.

The second storyline centers on the village of Cleverley where strange thing happen among the forest of tombstones, ruined abbey and a cursed pond that form the cemetery. A small boy walking home witnessed a man, clad in "a voluminous cloak with the collar raised," appear out of a cloud of smoke to fumble with "a thin cord, knotted in several places." Nearly a month later, a little girl "follows a strange cloud of smoke as far as the cemetery" where she is attacked. This prompted some of the villagers to take action.

Cleverley blames Dorian Radovic, a Russian Count and antique dealer, whose crime was not merely being a stranger, but having had "the temerity to marry the heiress of the village," Rosa Eversleigh, upon his arrival and the tragedies that followed in its wake that left two people dead – a child from the village and the countess. Rosa drowned herself in the haunting pond which "exerted a dangerous fascination over those weak-willed." A year later, Radovic remarries Marjorie Walker, but she died of a heart attack and villagers swear to have seen her ghost taking nocturnal walks. And there were implications her ghost was restless because her husband had killed her. So, when the girl was attacked, the vicar, blacksmith and a salesman decide to investigate the Eversleigh family vault where they make a startling discovery. The burial vault has been desecrated, stakes had been driven through the hearts of the Count's dead wives and one of the corpses "had not deteriorated in the course of eighteen months." This is still only the beginning as evidence and public opinion turn heavy against the Count. Most astonishingly, of all, the count walked pass a mirror several times without his reflection being seen in it!

So, in the face of all these inexplicable incidents, Radovic's third wife, Elena, asks a friend, Ann Sheridan, to come down for support. This is where the pace slows down a little as the middle portion of the story follows Ann and Elena as the situation worsens. And, to be fair, it exposes Halter's biggest flaw. Uneven as he may be as a plotter, what has always hampered his (technically) historical mysteries is that they often lack a sense of time and place with characters acting out-of-time. I think a stronger presence of the historical settings would have elevated both his very best and very worst novels. Paul Doherty can get away with a minor or even a weak locked room mystery, like The Herald of Hell (2015) and The Great Revolt (2016), because he fully deploys their historical settings. Same can be said for the historical locked room mysteries by John Dickson Carr (e.g. Captain Cut-Throat, 1955) and Robert van Gulik (e.g. The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959), but it's something I have come to accept from Halter. And, as someone once observed, Halter strove for "an entertaining story, not authenticity." It's just that novels like The Mask of the Vampire remind me how much better they could have been with a dab of historical color.

Anyway, Owen Burns, Achilles Stock and Wedekind eventually come to the Cleverley when one of the villagers got strangled to death inside a locked room, which mirrors the 1896 murder of Violet Starling, but there were three witnesses to the murder – who were standing outside the door and windows of the house. What the two witnesses at the window saw was the murderer "disappear up the chimney as a cloud of smoke." Halter may be hopeless with his historical settings, but never let it be said the man doesn't know how to stage a locked room mystery. The uproar continue right up till the end, but, by that time, Burns begins to see the pattern in all the incidents. And he points out "the three essential links," or clues, between the cases: "two silver bullets, the spinning wheel and the spiritualist séances." Achilles Stock is a most useful as the Dr. Watson to Burns' Sherlock Holmes. Producing "a succinct recapitulation of everything that has happened," chronologically ordered and meticulously dated, as well as unwittingly giving Burns an idea how one of the locked room-tricks works. A scene that reminded me of coffee scene from the Jonathan Creek special Satan's Chimney (2001).

If you pack your plot with locked room murders and apparently supernatural occurrences, the denouement is going to eat up pages. But rest assured, the explanation to every impossibility is different and more than justify the lengthy conclusion.

The locked room-trick used in the murder of Violet Starling is a clever elaboration on an old dodge while the second locked room murder has a more complicated and involved solution, but nicely done with the added effect of the fleeing cloud of smoke. Suggesting the presence of a real vampire who can turn into fog or smoke "to traverse small openings such as chimneys, keyholes, or a minuscule gap in his coffin if it is closed." The problem of the incorruptible body is, by itself, not too spectacular, but dovetailed nicely with the overarching plot and the absence of Radovic's reflection is a small triumph. One of Halter's most original and inspired ideas which really should have been put to use in a separate short story or novel. Something along the lines of Carr's radio-play "The Man without a Body" (1943). I really enjoyed that one and the diagram was very much appreciated.

What I appreciated even more than all the impossibilities and the "avalanche of mysteries from the start," is the overarching plot and how everything tied together while toying with the expectations of the genre-savvy reader (ROT13/SPOILERS: n gjvfgl, zhygv-ynlrerq gnxr ba gur crefrphgvba cybg jvgu ivpgvzf naq crecrgengbef cerlvat ba rnpu bgure). You shouldn't expect anything close to realism and even by detective story standards, or Halter's own track record, the plot is extraordinarily rich. But that's what The Mask of the Vampire one of the better, more entertaining of Halter's locked room mysteries. Not in the same league as his very best efforts, but The Mask of the Vampire could very well end up in my bottom five of top ten favorite Halter novels. A locked room reader's locked room mystery!

Penelope's Web (2001) by Paul Halter

I remember reading Xavier Lechard's review of Paul Halter's La toile de Pénélope (Penelope's Web, 2001) back in the late 2000s, on his old blogspot, describing the story as "one of Halter's most orthodox detective novel" born from a challenge posed by a Belgian scholar, Vincent Bourgeois – challenging him to devise "a strange manner" to seal the scene of a crime. Xavier praised Penelope's Web as an "elegantly and soundly devised" locked room mystery that ended up looking "more like Christie than Carr."

That old review never stopped to intrigue me and cemented Penelope's Web on my impossible crime wishlist. But, at the time, the only English translations of Halter's work consisted of a smattering of short stories with the first novel-length translation finally being published in 2010. Over the next ten years, John Pugmire of Locked Room International would go on to publish sixteen of Halter's novels and compiled two short story collections. Penelope's Web remained untranslated and tantalizingly inaccessible until recently. So let's cut through the tangled web of this long, eagerly anticipated translation.

Professor Frederick Foster was an entomologist who went to South America, "to study some rare species of spider," three years ago, but he went missing in Brazil and his body was eventually found on the bank of a river – murdered by a band of savages. Back home, the Foster household continued and his widow, Ruth Foster, became engaged to the local physician, Dr. Paul Hughes, who has been treating her for an illness of retina that made her practically blind. Ruth and Paul receive a nasty shock when they receive news that the body in Brazil was misidentified and Professor Foster is not only alive, but on his way back home to the village of Royston.

Professor Foster brought back more than just stories and anecdotes about his "incredible tribulations in the Amazonian jungle." What he brought back are some very rare, even hitherto unknown species of spiders and "practically tamed" one of them, which he named after his goddaughter, Penelope Ellis. Penelope is one of those unknown species with very well-developed silk-spinning organs and can spin a web faster than her sisters. Professor Foster placed Penelope in an open window of his study where she spun an fine, intricate silk web stretched across the oak window frame. Something that becomes important later on in the story.

So the situation is an uneasy one and begins to deteriorate when questions arise about his identity. A photograph of the professor turns up, but the name scribbled on the back, Peter Thompson, is that of his traveling partner. The man whose body was found on a Brazilian riverbank. Or was it? There's no denying Thompson is, or was, the spitting image of Professor Foster, but are they dealing with an impostor? A question that's not as easily answered as it should be.

Ruth is half-blind and Dr. Hughes always tried to avoid Professor Foster, because he had eyes only for his wife. Ruth's 12-year-old orphaned nephew, James, remembered him only as the uncle who read him Thousand and One Nights and Gulliver's Travels as an 8-year-old (he recently turned 12), while the professor brother-in-law, Major Edwin Brough, confessed he can't be sure either way – only Penelope believes Professor Foster is her godfather. Even if he aged, lost a lot of weight and grew a beard. So the police has to get involved and they tracked down a set of fingerprints from registry office to settle the matter. Shades of John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938)! But, of course, the fingerprints gets stolen during a frantic search for two escaped spiders.

The situation becomes an impossible one when Professor Foster apparently shot himself in his study with "the only door bolted from the inside" and two, of the three, windows "more or less rusted in place." The third window is open, but covered entirely by Penelope's intricately-woven, unbroken silky web. The dark hole in his temple was still "oozing blood" when they broke down the door and there was "a strong smell of gunpowder in the room." However, the police quickly eliminate the possibility of suicide, but how could it have been murder? Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst happen to be on hand to help out the local policeman in charge, Inspector Mike Waddell. 

Penelope's Web is one of Halter's shortest novels to date with the murder taking place close to halfway mark, which makes it tricky to discuss further details. Suffice to say, Halter delivered on his promise of not only finding a new way to lock and seal a room, but came up with an original, tailor-made solution to fit a very novel impossible crime. Interestingly, the how doesn't immediately reveal the murderer's identity, which was almost ruined by the annoying use of unidentifiable pronouns. Even when they made no sense to use in certain sentences. However, this hardly detracted from an overall enjoyable, clever and original locked room mystery. One that strongly reminded me of Halter's Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996) as it shared some of its strength and weaknesses.

While both Penelope's Web and The Invisible Circle both sport original impossible crimes with equally original solutions, but they're not exactly flawless and you can pick holes in them. For example (no spoilers), Dr. Hughes points out to Dr. Twist that there are "traces of gunpowder on the temple" indicating "the shot was fired from point-blank range," but, according to the solution, the shot was fired "through a piece of cloth." There are some other details about the locked room-trick that can be a little sketchy or make you scratch your head.

Penelope's Web is not merely the sum of its locked room-trick and Xavier said in his old review the story ended up being more Christie than Carr. I sort of agree. Penelope's Web is arguably better as who-and whydunit than as an impossible crime story as Halter expertly dangled the smartly clued solution in front of the reader's eye while simultaneously planting red herrings as a distraction. Judging the story purely as a whodunit, Penelope's Web stands as one of his stronger and more solid efforts. The locked room-trick is merely the cherry on top. You can say the same about the second murder, which gave the story a dark and tragic tinge, but a good use of a second murder that's not merely there as padding. Still a pity, because the second victim would have made an interesting detective character. Even if it was just for a one-shot.

So, yeah, I personally enjoyed and recommend Penelope's Web, but mystery readers who are still struggling with Halter might find themselves in another frustrating catch-as-catch-can wrestling match with his own unique brand of plotting and mystery writing.

Now that Penelope's Web can be crossed off my Halter/LRI wishlist, I hope Le crime de Dédale (The Crime of Daedalus, 1997), Le géant de pierre (The Stone Giant, 1998), Le douze crimes d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001), Le voyageur du passé (The Traveler from the Past, 2012) and Le tigre borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger, 2004) will follow soon!

The White Lady (2020) by Paul Halter

Last year, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published a worldwide exclusive, La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) by Paul Halter, which was released in Chinese, English and Japanese before it finally appeared in French – as well as marking his return to the novel-length locked room mystery. There was a five year gap between Le masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2014) and The Gold Watch, but Halter is back and up to his old tricks again.

Le mystére de la Dame Blanche (translated as The White Lady, 2020) is Halter and Pugmire's second "worldwide exclusive in celebration of LRI's 10th anniversary year." What better way to celebrate that milestone that with a ghostly locked room mystery!

Halter uses the opening chapter to grab the reader, spin them around a few times and push them, slightly disoriented, straight into the story, which must have been done to prevent even the most experienced reader from immediately getting a foothold on the case – while not neglecting to drop a clue or two. So the readers gets a lot to digest in the first two chapters, but the gist is that Major John and Margot Peel are en route to Buckworth Manor. Margot has been summoned there by her sister, Ann Corsham, because their father, Sir Matthew Richards, unexpectedly married his private secretary, Vivian Marsh. Ann believes Vivian to be "a vulgar schemer" whose "plan is obvious to everyone" except their father. She wants Margot and John to come down to help "take the wool from over father's eye."

However, this family reunion doesn't breakdown in an outright civil war. On the contrary, the sisters slowly warmed to their much younger stepmother and the whole situation became kind of friendly, but then another woman entered the household. The White Lady! A ghost which has haunted Buckworth for centuries and she has uncanny knack to vanish, as if by magic, every time she's cornered.

One night, Sir Matthew wakes up, cold to the bone, turns on the light and sees the figure of a woman standing in the middle of the room. A woman dressed in a long, white cape and a white shawl over her head. She smiles, raised her hand and contemplated touching Sir Matthew, but shook her head and disappeared through the bedroom door with Sir Matthew on her heels – who followed her into a small study at the end of a corridor. Sir Matthew saw her open and shut the door behind her, but, when he went after, "the strange apparition had mysteriously vanished." There was no place, or room, in the study to hide (for long) and window was closed. And this was actually not the first appearance of the White Lady at Buckworth Manor.

In early summer, Sir Matthew's other son-in-law, Peter Corsham, was a approached in the park by the ghostly figure of a woman, "in all white," but she quickly turned around and saw her go straight through a six-feet high, wire fence "as if it didn't exist." So is the village haunted or is someone playing the ghost to frighten the people at the manor? The White Lady makes another appearance, but this time, she strikes away from the manor house. And she leaves a body behind!

Billy, Jack and Harry are ten-year-old boys and the village troublemakers who are arguing over their latest scheme when Billy tells Harry to go chew grass. So, in response, Harry tore some leaved twigs from a nearby bush, stuffed them in his mouth and started chewing, but they were twigs of hemlock. And when Harry begins to feel sick, the White Lady appears and touches him on the brow. Harry "staggered and dropped to the ground" as a terrified Jack and Billy "watched her slowly disappear into the darkness of the woods."

Inspector Richard Lewis is the Buckworth policeman charged with investigating the initial White Lady sightings and, when the child died, he contacted Scotland Yard, but Superintendent Frank Wedekind has too many cases on his plate and handed over this brainteaser to his old friend, Owen Burns – an aesthete who appreciates murder as a fine art. Burns tells his friend and Watson-like chronicler that they're up against "the most implacable enemy of all" against "whom one can do nothing." Burns acts as much as an enigma as the murderer and shows full mastery over "the art of uttering mystifying words" and keeping everyone else in the dark about "the fruit of his cogitations." He also shows a great deal of interest in the village recluse, Lethia Seagrave, who lives alone with her animals and earns money with fortune telling. But is she the White Lady? Neither the police or Burns seem to get to a speedy conclusion. All the while, the White Lady continues to terrorize Buckworth Manor like some demented Scooby Doo villain!

The Gold Watch

In one instance, the White Lady managed to disappear from a corridor when all the exists were under observation and this impossibilities comes with a floorplan, but an accumulation of impossible situations and inexplicable apparitions is a double-edged sword. Especially with Halter. On the one hand, it makes for an exciting and fun read, but delivering good, or original, solutions for multiple impossibilities usually proves to be a bridge too far. Halter's Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997) is a textbook example of biting off more than you can chew and The White Lady unfortunately is no exception.

Two of the miraculous vanishings have such disappointing solutions that you have to wonder why they were presented as locked rooms in the first place. One of them actually had a good reason to be underwhelming, but it would have been better if the White Lady in these two instances had simply disappeared behind a corner or tree, because as badly done impossible crimes, they kind of knocked down the whole story a peg or two – instead of enhancing the plot. These two poorly handled disappearances are a serious blotch on an otherwise well done and typical Halter detective novel.

Halter showed more ingenuity with the two murders and his presentation of the White Lady throughout the story. The seemingly accidental poisoning of Harry and the ghostly appearance was more in line with what readers expect from an impossible crime and the second death was not unjustly described by Burns as "a Machiavellian murder." A cruelly executed, nearly perfect, murder that the killer could have gotten away with had it not been for those meddling detectives. I compared the White Lady with a demented Scooby Doo villain, which is how she's presented and it worked for me. Halter didn't take the Hake Talbot route by loading the story with an eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere in which a phantom-like entity appears as easily as she disappears, but admits there's something strange and earthly about the ghost. A ghost who sometimes "traverses walls and wire fences without difficulty" but, at other times, "she opens doors and windows in her path." It drives home the idea that someone, somewhere, is playing a deep game. This is what makes it so disappointing that only one of the impossible crimes is up to scratch and the result is that The White Lady doesn't come anywhere near to matching its marvelous and ambitious predecessor, The Gold Watch.

So, on a whole, The White Lady was a good and fun read, but very much a mid-tier Halter novel in line with Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988), La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) and the previously mentioned The Seven Wonders of Crime. And that's disappointing coming right after a time-shattering detective novel with a plot covering an entire century! Honestly, I begin to believe Halter is actually better at handling and exploring wondrous themes than hammering out hard locked room-tricks. La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), Le septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996), L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) and The Gold Watch are some of his best and most memorable novels, which don't lean heavily on their impossible crimes. Even when they're really good.

I can only recommend The White Lady to long-time Halter fans and advise readers who are new to his work to start somewhere else.

The Helm of Hades (2019) by Paul Halter

I've reviewed a sundry of short (locked room) stories over the past two years, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's ghostly "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but my last review of a short story collection was D.L. Champion's The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) – posted back in April of last year. So it was about time I tackled another compendium and John Pugmire's Locked Room International recently published something that fitted the bill.

The Helm of Hades (2019) is Paul Halter's second collection of short stories to appear in English, preceded by the appetizingly The Night of the Wolf (2006), which formally introduced non-French speaking readers to Halter's imaginative brand of detective fiction. This second volume comprises entirely of translated stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine between 2007 and 2019. And celebrated French locked room anthologist, Roland Lacourbe, penned an introduction promising "the wildest impossibilities." Well, that enough to lure me into the back of your van!

"Le gong hanté" ("The Gong of Doom") is the fist of ten stories and takes place at "the meeting-place of a select circle of prosperous Londoners" devoted to "the discussion of puzzling mysteries," The Hades Club, where Dr. Alan Twist tells Superintendent Charles Cullen the story of "a senseless and inexplicable murder" – committed at the end Great War. Colonel Henry Strange has an argument with the prospective husband of his niece, Philip, inside his locked study. During their argument, the haunted gong in the study sounded without being struck and Colonel Strange sank to the floor with an arrow piercing his neck. However, the door of the study was locked on in the inside and the ground overlooking the open window was covered with virgin snow. So there was nowhere any mysterious archer could have hidden to fire the fatal arrow.

A solid and tantalizing premise reminiscent of the locked room situation from Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938), but the solution is a coincidence-laden farce and an absolute cheat! I suppose the farcical slant could, sort of, have worked has the ultimate fate of Philip not cast a bleak shadow over the story. However, I did like the false-solution that made use of the kandjar (a dagger) hanging on the wall. Otherwise, a very poor story that should not have opened this collection.

"L'échelle de Jacob" ("The Ladder of Jacob") is an excellently done short story about a man who fell to his death from a great height without any tall buildings or cliffs at the scene, but have already discussed the story in my review of the massive locked room anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). The third story is "L'homme au visage d'argile" ("The Man with the Face of Clay"), but read it before and disliked the solution to the locked room shooting. One of my big no-noes.

The next story in line is "La vengeance de l'épouvantail" ("The Scarecrow's Revenge") and succeeded where "The Gong of Doom" failed so miserably.

Dr. Alan Twist is in France where Commissaire Pierre Legrand tells him about an abominable crime that took place in Gondeville, a small village not far from Cognac, which involved a dead, but vengeful, husband and a premonitory dream that came to pass only a few hours later – in "the form of an impossible crime." Janine is haunted by the memory of her late, unlamented husband and has a terrifying nightmare that he came back in the guise of their scarecrow. And killed her father with a pitchfork. This nightmare became a reality when her father is found the following morning lying on the muddy ground beneath the scarecrow with only one set of footprints going from the front door to the scarecrow.

A very well-done, properly motivated impossible crime story with a better and more original solution than the answer to the homicidal snowman from "L'abominable homme de neige" ("The Abominable Snowman," collected in The Night of the Wolf). A solution that both worked and was genuinely tragic without the grim bleakness.

"Les feux de l'Enfer" ("The Fires of Hell") is, plot-wise, one of the weakest story in the collection and revolves around a man who can see visions of the future, which he used to predict a series of "inexplicable fires" that even a police cordon was unable to prevent. However, the firebug is easily spotted and the method was more underwhelming than disappointing. You can find better treatments of the impossible fire-starter gimmick in John Russell Fearn's Flashpoint (1950) and Arthur Porges' "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and "Fire for Peace" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018).

Last year, I reviewed "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir") together with "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book") and three other, non-English detective stories in a post entitled "Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories" – which, like this review, turned out to be a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, "The Yellow Book" was a wonderfully crafted story with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from one of Halter's earlier novels. In comparison, "The Wolf of Fenrir" was only so-so.

"La balle de Nausicaa" ("Nausicaa's Ball") is the only non-impossible crime story to be found in this collection and seems to be modeled after such Agatha Christie stories as Evil Under the Sun (1941), Towards Zero (1944) and "Triangle at Rhodes" (collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Dr. Alan Twist is on a much deserve holiday in Corfu, Greece, where he hopes to have a break from all the inexplicable, seemingly unsolvable murders dogging his every step, but, on his first day, bumped into a holidaying Superintendent Cullen. Soon their attention is drawn to the cast and film crew staying at their hotel. And, in particular, the eternal triangle of the group.

Rachel Syms is a gorgeous actress who was the female-lead in a movie that was shot in the same location a year ago, but she fell in love with her young, unknown screen partner, Anthony Shamp, who, according to the critics, played "a marvelous Ulysses" – returning a year later to shoot the sequel. She brought along her husband, George Portman. A perfect recipe for murder! This comes to pass when George's falls to his death from "a series of steps cut into the rock which zig-zag down a hundred feet to the beach," but the lonely, isolated location of the lagoon severely reduces the number of suspects. The solution hinges on pulling apart a carefully-planned alibi, but there's one technical detail that raised an eyebrow. Nonetheless, this story still stands as a nicely done homage to the Queen of Crime from a modern craftsman of the locked room puzzle.

"La tombe de David Jones" ("The Robber's Grave") is a good example of Halter's fertile imagination when it comes to dreaming up new seemingly impossible situations and reviewed it last year, under the title  "Devil's Soil: Halter, Hoch and Hoodwinks," together with a story from the King of the Short Story, Edward D. Hoch.

Lastly, the collection closes out with the most recently translated short story, "Le casque d'Hadès" ("The Helm of Hades"), published in the March/April, 2019, issue of EQMM. This time the detective is the Edwardian-era aesthete and amateur reasoner, Owen Burns, who acts as an armchair oracle as he listens to the tale of a murder that appears "to have been inspired by the prince of darkness himself." A well-known archaeologist, Conrad Berry, who threw a party to celebrate his greatest discovery, the Helm of Hades. A legendary bronze helmet that makes everyone who wears it "as transparent as the air that you breathe." During the party, Berry is savagely attached inside his archaeological room while people were sitting outside.

According to their evidence, they heard the footsteps of "an invisible creature" walking across the creaky floorboards of the room, open and close the door of the archaeological room, carry out a brutal and noisy assault – after which it retraced its footsteps and knocked over a Chinese vase on the way. As if an invisible entity had entered and left the scene of the crime! A very original and grandly staged premise for a locked room mystery, but the solution, while acceptable enough, has a weakness I've come to associate with Jonathan Creek (e.g. Angel Hair, 2003). A type of involved solution that can only work when it's really, really involved.

I used to believe the short story format brought out the best in Halter, because it allowed him to play on his major strengths (plot and imagination), while downplaying his weaknesses, but have only read a selection of (mostly) his better short stories since his first collection was published in 2006. This colored my perception over the years. The Helm of Hades shows he was very hit-and-miss and needs the length of a novel to give his plethora of ideas some breathing space. Halter still produced a some classic short locked room stories, but, in general, I think he's better when writing novel-length impossible crime stories. Just read L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) or Le montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019).

So, yeah, The Helm of Hades is, as so often is the case with these collection, a mixed bag of tricks, but the better specimens, such as "The Scarecrow's Revenge," "The Robber's Grave" and "The Yellow Book," still makes it a welcome addition to my locked room library.

The Gold Watch (2019) by Paul Halter

La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) is the latest mystery novel by that fabricator of miracles, Paul Halter, which is a unique title in his body of work as it was not originally published in French, but preceded by publications in English, Japanese and Chinese – giving non-French readers an exclusive. Halter dedicated the book to Chinese author, translator and publisher, Fei Wu, who had "subtly persuaded" him to write this story. So my assumption is that it was Fei Wu's idea to give the book this uncommon publishing route.

The Gold Watch is certainly worthy of special treatment, because it's one of Halter's most intricately plotted detective novels, intertwining two parallel stories, playing out on opposite ends of the previous century.

The story opens with a prologue set in October, 1901, in which an elderly woman loses her precious gold fob watch in a rainy street and is then pursued by "a furtive figure" into a dark passageway. A strange, lonely scene witnessed through a rain-streaked window by a ten-year-old boy who later said the woman had looked at her own house as if it had "turned into a pumpkin." There are two, thickly woven strands that make up the remainder of the plot, a past and a contemporary narrative, which respectively take place in 1911 and 1991.

In the past narrative, the principle players are Andrew and Alice Johnson. Andrew Johnson began his career as a Bohemian artist, but one of his colorful paintings caught the artistic, sensitive eye of the director a fabric importing company, Mrs. Victoria Sanders – who made him "a very attractive offer of employment." He accepted and rapidly climbed to the position of deputy director the London-based company. Mrs. Sanders invited André and Alice to stay with her at Raven Lodge for a long weekend.

Raven Lodge is an imposing, old-fashioned country house standing at the wooded edge of the tiny village of Broomfield and a comfortable spot to spend a long weekend during the "glacial beginning," but the Johnsons aren't too thrilled about the other invitees. Daren Bellamy is an arrogant, good-for-nothing parasite who leeches off his sister, Mrs. Sanders, but she can't bring herself to disown him or side against him. And warns Andrew to understand her position. Cheryl Chapman is Andrew's secretary and a former model who has posed nude for him, which Alice discovers when she sees the painting in Mrs. Sander's bedroom that landed Andrew his lucrative job opportunity.

Cheryl and Daren get on swimmingly, but, when they decide go for a walk in the snow, they come across the body of Mrs. Sanders. She appeared to have tripped and cracked her skull on a stone, which is corroborated by the single line of footprints in the snow leading up to the body, but Inspector Wedekind is aware that the victim's unsavory brother is about "to inherit quite a packet" – which makes him think this accident is "a perfect crime in the snow." So he dispatches a telegram to that dandy aesthete, Owen Burns, who appreciates murder as a fine art. And he attaches great importance to the missing copy of Robert W. Chamber's The King in Yellow (1895).

The plot-threads that form the 1911 story-line is interspersed with the narrative from 1991, in which a promising playwright, André Lévêque, is obsessed with finding an obscure suspense movie he only remembers seeing fragments of as a child and college student. A clutter of fragmentary memories of scenes of a house in the rain, a roving figure, a door-knob slowly turning, a close-up of a terrified old woman and there was "a strange, macabre detail on the ground" – a shiny, precious object. Now these fragmentary memories seem to be causing a serious case of writer's block.

Japanese edition

So with the full support of his wife, Célia, he consults with a local psychoanalyst, Dr. Ambroise Moreau, who agrees to help him bring his distant memories back to the surface, identify the long-lost film and track down a copy. Dr. Moreau warns André that these vivid images from the film may be connected to other, more painful, memories that he has buried deep in his subconscious. There's an impossible crime here as well. One that was committed in 1966.

André saw the trailer of the film at the home of his childhood friend, Guy Lamblin, who was the only one of his friends whose family owned a television set. Janine was Guy's mother, but she unexpectedly died when accidentally falling from the top of an old quarry. She had been walking with her husband and some friends, but when she was standing apart from them, near the edge, they suddenly heard her cry. And they had to watch as she plunged fifty feet to her death. It had to be an accident, because nobody was standing near her.

This is the point where the plot becomes a little bit tricky to discuss, but I can say that the impossible crimes occupy opposite ends of the quality scale.

I think Halter imagined a clever and creative variation to explain away the no-footprints scenario in the murder in the snow, which is quite intricate and involved, but avoided becoming too convoluted and incomprehensible. Admittedly, the maps helped enormously in building a crystal clear imagine in my mind how the trick in the snow was worked. On the other hand, the solution to the impossible push from the top of the old quarry is relatively simplistic, but also utterly banal and disappointing – something you would expect from the pulps. However, the who, why or even how of these crimes is not the best and most fascinating aspects of The Gold Watch. It's the firm, ice-cold grasp time appears to have on the characters and events in the story.

Halter stretched the plot of The Gold Watch across nearly a whole century with the continues presence of gold fob watches as the only mysterious constant in an ever-chancing landscape, which appeared to drag and trap the characters in a weird time-well or ripple. What I liked even more is how time seemed to accelerate as the overall story progressed. The Gold Watch started out as a normally paced detective story, but slowly, the clock hands began to tick faster, and faster, until it dramatically exploded in full melodrama. I was reminded of a tightly wound-up, aggressively ticking cartoon clock that explodes and spits out its mechanical innards. I found the effect to be very pleasing.

But then again, I'm a sucker for these sadly rare detective stories distorting or shattering the perception of time. This is why I loved Christopher Bush's Cut Throat (1932), Halter's L'image trouble (The Picture from the Past, 1995) and the criminally underrated Jonathan Creek episode Time Waits for Norman (1998). Hopefully, I haven't jinxed The Gold Watch by saying that, because I hold a minority opinion on all of them. Seriously, there are only two or three other people who like Time Waits for Norman.

Obviously, The Gold Watch is now one of my favorite Halter mysteries, which is a fascinating, time-shattering detective story with an excellently positioned and executed impossible crime, but even more impressive is how beautiful all the plot-strands, decades apart, interacted and were pulled together – proving that murder can be a fine art. Highly recommended!

A note for the curious: celebrated French anthologist and impossible crime enthusiast, Roland Lacourbe, has an off-page cameo in the 1991 story-line.