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.

Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories

Exactly a year ago, I reviewed a collection of short stories, The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018) by James Holding, which gathered all ten short stories about two mystery writers, Martin Leroy and King Danforth, who play armchair detectives with their wives during a world cruise – which were originally published between 1960 and 1972 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Obviously, this series is hugely indebted to Ellery Queen falling somewhere between Queen's International Case Book (1964) and the Puzzle Club stories from Queen's Experiments in Deduction (1968). But with story-title structure of the early international series (e.g. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932).

So, I was a little surprise to learn that the man behind Wildside Press, John Gregory Betancourt, penned a brand new "Leroy King" story. You read that correctly. Betancourt wrote a pastiche of a pastiche!

"The Jamaican Ice Mystery" was originally published in Malice Domestic 13: Murder Most Geographical (2018) and reissued earlier this year, in ebook format, as a separate short story, in which Martin Leroy and King Danforth are reappear as two octogenarians – adding another layer of EQ lore to the "Leroy King" series. You see, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu wrote a superb pastiche, entitled "The Book Case," in which a 100-year-old Ellery Queen solves the murder of a collector of detective novels in 2007. This story is collected in a recent Wildside Press anthology, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018).

The story opens during one of the yearly cruises of Martin Leroy and King Danforth, accompanied by their wives, Carol and Helen, who are enjoying the Caribbean sun on the deck of the Jamaica Queen. There are complaints about how the bartender doesn't know how to mix a gimlet and their disastrous Netflix miniseries. They reminiscence about "the unsettled '60s" and observe that they didn't have "a decent murder to solve in decades." And as on cue, a porter informs them a woman had been murdered and robbed in the suite next to the Danforths.

Obviously, Betancourt was having too much fun with resettling the characters into a contemporary setting, which came at the expense of the plot. They're using smartphones, Google and Twitter, but the plot is paper-thin and the two problems, a poisoning and theft of a necklace, pose no challenge to the reader whatsoever – especially when the borrowed ice bucket is mentioned. So, purely as a detective story, I can't really recommend it, but, if you're a fan of the original series, you might want to pick it up to see how Martin and King are doing.

The second story comes from one of the founding members of the shin honkaku school of detective fiction in Japan, Takemaru Abiko, who debuted last year in English with a translation of Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989). A funny and clever impossible crime novel translated by Ho-Ling Wong and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. This time, they ferried a short story across the language barrier with a practically unique detective-character.

The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu

Ho-Ling Wong called "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" ("The Puppet Deduces in the Tent") quite good as a locked room mystery and deemed it the best of four short stories from Abiko's Ningyou wa kotatsu de suiri suru (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu, 1990). The translation changed the story-title to "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" and can be found in this years double June/July issue of EQMM.

The detective of the story, or to be more precise, the vessel for the detective is a young, shy ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, whose puppet-character is the more outspoken Mario Marikōji, but this is more than merely a ventriloquist act – because Tomonaga has a split personality. And that other personality expresses itself through the puppet, Mario. Was this series the inspiration for that atrocious anime detective-series, Karakurizōshi ayatsuri Sakon (Doll Puppeteer Sakon)?

"A Smart Dummy in the Tent" takes place on the opening day of carnival, among the colored tents on large vacant lot, where Tomonaga performs in the big circus tent with Mario, but the festivities are canceled when one of the performers is found murdered. Panda Gotanda was a "slapstick magician," like Tommy Cooper, who was found beaten to death in one of the partitioned dressing rooms on the western end of the tent. The entrance to the dressing room was "under observation," until the body was found, while the hemline of the tent fabric is secured to the ground with metal anchor pins. You need a special instrument to pull them out. So this leaves the police with only a single viable suspect, Mutsuki Seno'o, who's a friend of Tomonaga. And one of the few people who know about his split personality. She encourages him to help the police solve the locked-tent murder.

The solution to the locked-tent is excellent and entirely original, which makes you wonder why nobody else came up with it before. My only complaint is the unnecessary final twist in the story's tail, but suppose it fits Abiko's tongue-in-cheek approach. Other than that, "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" is a welcome addition to the steady growing pile of shin honkaku detective stories and novels.

By the way, Abiko made a reference to "the protagonist from that famous comic by the legendary Osamu Tezuka," Jack Black, which must have pleased Ho-Ling to no end.

The next story is Paul Halter's "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir"), published in the double March/April, 2015, issue of EQMM, which was ranked by JJ as Halter's eighth best short story back in February – placing it above "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Robber's Grave." See, JJ, this is exactly why we had four Anglo-Dutch wars.

"The Wolf of Fenrir" opens in the winter of 1912 in the comfortable flat of Owen Burns, in St. James's Square, where he tells Achilles Stock the story of woman who was attacked and killed by a wolf in France. She was all alone in a cabin, in the wood, which was surrounded by snow and the only prints in the snow belonged to the victim and the animal she believed had been tamed. Naturally, this turns out to be a deviously contrived murder, but the solution turns out to be two very basic locked room-tricks spliced together. So not very impressive. However, the no-footprints scenario is arguably the hardest type of impossibility to plot and even harder to be original. And the rest of the plot was pretty solid.

So, on a whole, "The Wolf of Fenrir" is not a bad detective story, but Halter has written better ones. Some of those stories appeared were ranked lower by JJ.

Luckily, Halter and JJ redeemed themselves with the excellent "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book"), published in the July/August, 2017, issue of EQMM and coming in third on JJ's best-of list of Halter short stories – beaten only by "La nuit du loup" ("The Night of the Wolf") and the unrivaled "La hache" ("The Cleaver"). Seriously, "The Cleaver" is one of the best impossible crime short stories ever written!

"The Yellow Book" takes place during the winter of 1938 in a small village on the outskirts of Verdun, Malenmort, where a group of people meet once or twice a month at the home of Daniel Raskin "to invoke the spirits of the dear departed." When the story opens, the group receives a message from the spirits that one of them has been murdered and they discover "the sacrificial obsidian knife in the glass-fronted bookcase" has been stolen, but nobody at the gathering has been murdered. However, one of the regular members, Captain Marc Santerre, had called earlier in the day to excuse himself. And he lives in "a small, isolated house, less than five minutes' walk" from Raskin's house.

Captain Santerre is found beaten and stabbed to death in "a chalet locked from the inside" and "surrounded by virgin snow," which had been revealed by the spirits, who accused one of the people linking hands at the table. An inexplicable crime, if there ever was one. Luckily, Dr. Alan Twist happens to be in the neighborhood and unravels this tangled skein without leaving his armchair. I love these kind of armchair detective stories!

When the yellow book and mental state of the victim was brought up, I was afraid this was going to be house-of-monkeys-style shenanigans and wanted to tar-and-feather JJ, but the explanation took a decidedly different turn with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from an earlier Halter novel – which worked even better as a short story. So, yeah, this is without doubt one of Halter's better short stories. Highly recommended!

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk"

Finally, I have a short story from my own country: "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" ("The Corpse That Went For a Walk," 2019) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of M.P.O. Books, who can be credited with having penned one of the best Dutch detective novels, De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011).

Several years ago, Books abandoned Inspector Bram Petersen of District Heuvelrug and introduced two new series-characters in 2017, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in cold cases. This series succeeded admirably in marrying the traditional detective story to the modern misdaadroman (crime novel) and littered with impossible crimes. One of my favorite stories is the locked room mystery "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" is not an impossible crime tale, or even an old-fashioned whodunit, but the setting makes it somewhat of a standout in the series.

Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover is located on the fifth floor of a residential tower, the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland. One evening, the woman living next door, Lettie Kreft, comes to them with the astonishing story that she found a body of woman, in the hallway of an apartment, on the thirteenth floor. A knife was sticking from her back. The apartment belongs to a sleazy, womanizing artist, Hans Molica, but when they arrive the body has disappeared! So what happened the body, if there was a body? And how do you dispose of a body on one of the top floors of a residential tower?

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk" is a relatively minor story, compared to some of the other entries in the series, but loved the idea of a murder-without-a-body problem with the Kolos van Cronesteyn as a backdrop. So, plot-wise, not one of the top Corbijn and De Jong stories, but still found it to be a good and fun read.

On a final note, I've some good news for all you non-Dutch speaking mystery readers: the very first Corbijn and De Jong short story, "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017), has been translated into English and will be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – either later this year or sometime in early 2020. Hopefully, this will kick open the door to get Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) and "The House That Brought Bad Luck" translated.