"Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."- Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet, 1887)
"Sidney Miles" is the nom-de-plum
adopted by a former resident of Blackfield on his return home, in the spring of
1887, to gather material for the novel he has been contemplating to write and
intends to draw from a nine year old, unsolved murder case – which could've
been ripped from the pages of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
The problem of a murder perpetrated in a
sealed room fascinates "Miles," convinced one day studies will be devoted to
the subject, and hopes future scholars will be poring over his fictionalized
account of the impossible death of the local philanthropist. Richard Morstan
had converted his study in a makeshift performance stage, partitioned by a
curtain, to treat a group of children to a magic show. While Morstan is behind
the curtain, someone, somehow, enters the room and the only evidence this person left behind was a body.
This is a conventional, but cautious,
description of the opening of Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog,
1988) and arguably Paul Halter's most ambitious detective/crime-thriller to be
introduced into the English language by John Pugmire's Locked Room International
to date. Reviewing detective stories can be a tricky business, but in this case
I can barely allow myself to comment on a single plot-thread, because I don't
want to give anything away. I would further recommend avoiding reading the back
cover. It gives away information you should discover on your own. Like three-ways through the book.
Anyhow, "Miles" teams-up with Major
Daniel Morstan, eager to do justice to the name of his brother, and the
daughter of the local inn-keeper, Cora, who picked up maturing in his absence –
and they decide he should pose as a detective from Scotland Yard. However, the
murder of Richard Morstan is as a problematic as penning this review and was
astonished at the possible solutions Halter left unmentioned. There was a door
in Morstan's curtained-off section of the study, but it was nailed shut with
three beams to eliminate any cheating and suggested (to me) the door could be
prepped beforehand to open in-and outwards – and a stagehand/killer could
squeeze between two of the three wooden bars. I could mention another one
involving the open and watched window, but, again, I don't want to give away
too much. I'll say this for Halter... he knew here how to keep clued-up mystery
readers busy with multiple possibilities. For a while, I suspected the book of
being a cleverly disguised homage to Carter Dickson's The Skeleton in the
Clock (1948), with the titular crimson fog being a reference to "the
pink flash," which gave me the idea for the open-window solution.
Naturally, their rooting around in the
village and questioning witnesses has repercussions in a detective story, and
before long, the phantom-like killer strikes again and manages to vanish from
its pursuers under baffling circumstances. This impossible angle is repeated in
the latter half of the book, but they're childishly simple, however, the impossibilities
aren't the reason you should pick up a copy of The Crimson Fog. It's a modern
take on those grand, France-feuilletons (e.g. Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of
the Yellow Room, 1907), but Halter (as an Anglophile) placed this
English-set mystery/thriller closer to American-style delirium tremens, such as
Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand (1945) and Fredric Brown's Night
of the Jabberwock (1950), than to the British Golden Age serial killer
novels – think Philip McDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931) and Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936).
Nevertheless, Halter deals a fair hand to
the reader (more than usual as far as I remember) and successfully walks the
fine tightrope between a traditional whodunit and a Victorian slasher. The
Crimson Fog is probably not everyone's poison of choice, but it's one of
those books you have to sample for yourself.
One thing I want to point out, SPOILER
(select to read): Halter's general weakness to breath life in his historical
settings could've been a strength here by withholding the period until the Jack
the Ripper-part came into play. The way Blackfield is described could've been
anywhere between the late 1800s right up to the actual Golden Age and all that
talk about early locked room mysteries would be clue as to the date of the
story. I'm just saying.
La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987)
Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988)
La tête du tigre (The Tiger's Head, 1991)
La septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991)
Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993)
Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997)
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