A World of Wonders

"Beauty, following the sun's example, prevents us seeing what's around it whenever it appears."

- Philon.

Whether you're carefully perusing the brittle pages of an old-fashioned whodunit or shooting over the fresh leaves of a neo-orthodox mystery, you are allowed one assumption if the sleuth hound happens to be nipping at the heels of a pernicious serial killer: the individual laboring fervently on the body count rarely does it to give sway to a twisted impulse, beaten into him as a child with a bible, or mere caprice. Serial killers that stalk the dark alleyways of this neighborhood of the detective story possess more refinement, cunning and are often as playful as a kitten with an attitude. A few well-known examples are Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936), Ellery Queen's A Cat of Many Tails (1949) and Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981).

Paul Halter's The Seven Wonders of Crime (1997) follows a somewhat similar route as its predecessors, but this time the seemingly unstoppable sequence of murders are perpetrated by an individual who's artistically inclined – as well as mischievous and machiavellian.

The elusive murderer, who seems to take pleasure in taunting and challenging the police with paintings that have cryptic hints plastered across their canvases, draws inspiration for a series of utterly bizarre and apparently impossible murders from the immense and architectural masterpieces of the ancient world: the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. From this premise emerges a fascinating picture as each murder in the chain corresponds, one way or another, with one of the wonders erected by the erstwhile civilizations that used to inhabit this globe – and their appearance makes it tempting to ascribe these crimes to one of the deities that were worshipped during those earlier times.

Naturally, these artistically inspired crimes eventually come into the peripheral vision of Owen Burns, an aesthete who considers murder to be one of the fine arts, and seems overwhelmed with the morbid creation of these felonious wonders. As his chronicler, Archilles Stock, notes, at one point in the book, is that his friend wallowed through this case as a shadow of his former self – completely blinded by the beauty that shrouded the truth behind these murders.

Let's consider some of these gruesome, but wondrous, works of art, which began with the death of a lighthouse keeper on a cut-off islet during a severe thunderstorm as a scream bellowed over the waves to the mainland – which is connected to the islet but during a storm the path to the lighthouse is temporarily inaccessible. People saw the man turn into a human torch on the parapet, but they were unable to reach him until the storm has quieted down and when they finally reach the lighthouse they find that someone had locked the old man in. Another murders offers the problem of a man who was felled by a crossbow bolt that was dispatched from such a distance and angle that it could only have happened if the archer was soaring through the sky on the flying nimbus of Sun Wukong.

I have picked out these two particular scenarios, because they are both original in their representation and inspired in their explanation – which made for a few new wrinkles in the pond of this beloved sub-genre of us. From the remaining five seemingly impossible murders two have a decent solution, two more are disappointing and one of them is simply preposterous. It involves a man who was uncovered in a house surrounded by un-trodden ground and the cause of death is dehydration, but there's a full carafe of water within arm reach of the deceased. I was expecting a solution as clever as the one Ronald Knox put forward to explain the starved man in his famous short story, "Solved by Inspection," but the answer is as psychologically impossible as the physical representation of the murder. But if you string together the seven murders that are, to all appearances, completely impossible, the ones with a stronger construction can easily carry the weaker ones and the section of the book where they are explained away, one after another, is the most satisfactory part of the story.

However, if the seven impossible murders represent Halter's strength, coming up with baffling premises, which are, often enough, accompanied with clever explanations, than the characters and setting represent his weaknesses – which were also present in the previous novels I have read.

There's still very little sense of time, place or characters, who seem to be unaware that they are people from the Edwardian period, which doesn't help, at all, in bringing that specific era alive like you should expect from someone who is seen as the modern-day heir of John Dickson Carr. Halter's idea of writing historical fiction seems to be throwing around a few allusions to the clattering of horses hooves in the opening chapters and hope that it will resonate with the reader until the closing parts of the book. It didn't.

I also noticed that the worlds in which he situates his novels can be very claustrophobic. The Seven Wonders of Crime reputedly infuses the nation with dread and terror, as the citizens breathe a sigh of relief when they find out that the next name in the headlines isn't theirs, but the investigators focus their attention on a single household – which makes this amazing case feel like a surprisingly domestic affair. Contrast this with Queen's A Cat of Many Tails, in which the city of New York is turned into cowering and frightened character as the murderer bumps off one its citizens after another.

Paul Halter remains a somewhat problematic writer, but one who has his heart in the right place and continues to exhume a part of the genre that others thought was buried forever. His only response to their horrified looks is a smug grin, that seems to suggest an unembarrassed pride at having just crammed over half a dozen impossible crimes between the covers of a single novel, which is a very infectious attitude that makes you want to overlook his flaws.

All in all, The Seven Wonders of Crime is an interesting, neo-orthodox detective novel that should have a spot on the shelves of every enthusiast of locked room mysteries and classically styled whodunits, but you have to take the good with the bad and accept the short comings that encircle the plot. The unbreakable chain of murders and their supernatural appearance are the main attraction of this novel with the actual murderer and clues a nudge or two below, however, they are not entirely without interest. Not perfect, but not bad either.

Remember, if you purchase a copy of this book, whether it's digital or paper bound, you are giving John Pugmire are helping hand in bringing more of these stories to an international audience and show the publishing world that there are readers interested in this neo-orthodox movement – and this may open-up Asia for us somewhere in the future! 

What's Up in the Attic?

"Enjoy the fantasy, the fun, the stories... but make sure there is a clear sharp line drawn on the floor, so you can step back behind that mark and re-embrace reality... to do otherwise is to embrace madness."

- James Randi, the magician who explains miracles.

Paul Halter

When I first learned of the detective stories penned by Paul Halter, it was the name of John Dickson Carr that captured the attention of this locked room enthusiast. Halter naturally found, what can be described as, divine inspiration in the myriad of books left to us mere mortals by the Greatest Player who ever participated in the Grandest Game in the World – and his most ardent followers were ready to tear his mantle from Edward Hoch's back and drape it across Halter's shoulder. That piqued my interest, to say the least, and the collection of short stories, The Night of the Wolf (2006), entailed a lot of promise and contains one or two gems, like "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Flower Girl," that will most likely became staples of future locked room anthologies.

This probably explains why I ended up disillusioned with Paul Halter, after reading The Lord of Misrule (1994) earlier this year. I expected to witness first hand the second advent of the greatest mystery writer who had ever lived, but instead was treated to a fairly standard and flawed detective story. In spite of its fantastical premise, it lacked the atmospheric touches and clueing you'd expect from John Dickson Carr's heir. But worst of all, there was no sense of time and place, which is not an unimportant element if you decide to set a story at the turn of the previous century, and the ghost-like presence of the masked figure, cloaked in black, who's accompanied by the tinkling of sleigh-bells never became the terrifying hobgoblin like any of the nightmares dreamed up by Carr and Talbot.

So evidently, I concluded that this Gallic scribe has a heart that beats in the right place and valorously tries to continue a tradition that's truly worthy of being preserved, but that he was only a second-stringer at best – at least as far as novel length narratives are concerned. Well, last night I blazed through his second roman fleuve, The Fourth Door (1987), and I was wrong. Stylistically, it has the same flaws as The Lord of Misrule, but plot-wise, it has nearly everything you hope to find in a locked room story – and the patterns that emerge from the plot will both fascinate and please the most demanding mystery readers.

The Fourth Door is set in a small, undesignated hamlet during the early 1950s where three befriended households, the Whites, the Stevenses and the Darnleys, are torn asunder by supernatural events and several, seemingly impossible, murders with most of the otherworldly activity coming from the attic room in the home of Mr. Darnley – where his wife killed herself years previously. At least, it was presumed to be a suicide since the door and windows were locked and fastened on the inside. Lodgers reported footsteps emanating from the room and neighbors witnessed a glowing light passing the attic windows. Needless to say, none of these lodgers roomed very long with Mr. Darnley.

That is, until Patrick and Alice Latimer arrive in town, one of them apparently endowed with the mediumistic gift to communicate with the spirit realm, who promptly take up their residence at the reputedly haunted house – and from there on out the fabric of reality begins to slowly disintegrate. The events that followed include a séance, during which Alice Latimer is able to answer a question written down and sealed away in an envelope, and someone who's seen at two different location, at exactly the same moment, before disappearing for the stretch of three years are only a prelude to an even more baffling occurance – a murder in a sealed attic room!

As an experiment, in the hopes of establishing a better line of communication with the ghost of Mrs. Darnley to find out who murdered her, the spiritualist Patrick Latimer will hold an all-night vigil in the haunted room, which is not only locked but also sealed with wax and stamped with an imprint of a rare and unique coin – picked at the last moment from a collection of 600 of such specimens and never left the hands of the witness after the room was sealed up. But when they break open the door, Patrick Latimer has evanesced and in his place, sprawled on the floor, lies body of another man with the handle of a knife protruding from his back!

The construction of the sealed room illusion is quite simply brilliant and I feel very smug for having stumbled on the main gist of the trick before it was even put up for performance. When the corridor and lay-out of the attic was described, I immediately knew how the trick would be pulled off and only missed out on the finer, more subtle details. The part I got wrong was actually embarrassing clumsy compared to what actually happened. I also have to commend Halter here for motivating this elaborate set-up and why anyone should go to all that trouble to create a supernatural crime.

There's also a second murder, committed in a house whose immediate surrounding is carpeted in an expanse of un-trodden snow, which has a delightfully simple, as well as shocking, solution – and even better motivated than the first one. As noted in the story, it's quite possibly unique in the genre. No mean feat!

Plot-wise, this is as good as they come and the cleverly constructed, multi-layered solutions are the impetus that drives our undying love for these stories. Nevertheless, I have to state here, empathically, that in spite of these triumphs I still wouldn't rank Paul Halter alongside John Dickson Carr. The fact that he writes detective stories in which people are bumped off in sealed environments at the hands of apparent supernatural agencies are not the main reason why we read the tales from the grandmaster of this particular sub-genre, but for the gripping narrative that gradually tightens its iron-glad grip around your throat and impresses you with the dread that every shadowy nook harbors unimaginable horrors.

I never had even as much as an inkling of this feeling with this book nor was there any genuine sense of time and place. There were several references to the mounting terror in the village, but merely stating that the atmosphere was threatening does very little to convey that feeling to the reader. The only time he came close was the part with "the cold hands," but that arose from the plot that had become so complex and turned upside down at that point in the story that you couldn't help but feel bewildered. Another problem was the village setting. Which village? Throughout the story you get the idea the entire village consists of only three houses and is only inhabited by the characters that live in them.

So I would have to disagree with those who stated that Paul Halter did everything right in The Fourth Door, but I will concede that he more than delivered on the parts that really mattered. It's one of the most intricately constructed detective stories I have read this year, with a plot that twists and coils like a boa-constrictor in an epileptic fit, and I was enthralled with the patterns that emerged from the plot. I said it best in my review of Marco Books' De laatste kans (2011), "It's not entirely unlike watching someone emanating perfect circles of smoke that seem to playfully interact with one another."

To sum it up, this is nothing short of a tour-de-force of plotting and restored the faith I had lost after the previous novel – and the mystery community owes John Pugmire one for his untiringly efforts to bring his stories to an international audience. You can help him with this by simply picking up a copy of The Fourth Door and enjoying the story, and, if possibly, share your thoughts with the rest of us.