The Sword in the Stone

"Whoso Pulleth Out This Sword of This Stone and Anvil, is Rightwise King Born of All England."

- Inscription on the Sword in the Stone (T.H. White's The Once and Future King, 1958)

Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996) is Paul Halter's eighth detective novel to be translated into English by John Pugmire, a modern-day purveyor of miracles, whose independent publishing house, Locked Room International, introduced a host of non-English speaking authors to a world-wide audience – such as Jean-Paul Török, Yukito Ayatsuji, Noel Vindry and Alice Arisugawa. Pugmire also reissued the shamefully neglected locked room novels by Derek Smith (e.g. Whistle Up the Devil, 1954), but I'll return to this author sooner rather than later. So, for now, let's take a look at one of Halter's most fanciful impossible crime tales.

The Invisible Circle is a short, standalone mystery novel that's best described as a clash between the Legends of the Knights of the Round Table and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939), which made for a fun and amusing detective romp.

The story takes place eight decades ago, in the year 1936, inside "a sort of castle by the sea in Cornwall." A wooden bridge is the only structure tenuously connecting the castle to the mainland and without this reach-across the place is effectively an isolated island. So you can probably make an educated guess about the fate of the bridge. Gerry Pearson is the sole occupant and owner of the castle, rumored to have belonged to Uther Pendragon, "Arthur's father," which he decided to put to good use as the backdrop for "a grotesque comedy" steeped in Arthurian legends – a real-life drama staged for a small group of people.

One of Pearson's specially selected guests is his niece, Madge, who wisely decided to take along her friend, Bill Page, but they're not the only ones who received an invitation from wicked Uncle Gerry.

The guest list Pearson compiled consists of the following characters: a white-bearded historian, named Josiah Hallahan, who's "the acknowledged expert on all things Arthurian" and this earned him the nickname of Merlin the Enchanter. Gail Blake is a Cornish bard and with his black beard "he looked more like a pirate or a smuggler than a poet." So they make for a nice pair of characters, but there are also Frank Dunbar and Ursula Brown: the former is a disillusioned and heavy drinking journalist whose downward slope began when the moment he had met the latter. They're both invited to the party! Finally, Pearson requested the presence of Dr. Charles Jerrold, an imminent psychiatrist, who was asked to attend as "a trustworthy witness."

Upon their arrival, Pearson casts each of them in the role of an Arthurian character and explains they were invited to be "privileged witnesses." The privilege to witness a murder. His own murder. Pearson says he knows who will strike him down and "this person will have constructed a perfect alibi," which proves this person "could not physically have committed the murder" and even pointed out his potential murderer – as well as showing everyone the instrument of his destruction. On a rocky cliff, a sword is embedded in a huge rock. Originally, the rock had been hollow, but has now been filled with mortar that irretrievably trapped the blade.

It seems completely impossible for anyone, except the ghost of King Arthur, to pull the sword from the stone, but Pearson instructs everyone to make a unique mark on the grip of the weapon – so "it can be formally identified." That sets the stage for one part of the murderous melodrama that's about the unfold and the next step is voluntary locking their host inside a tower room: one with a door that can be bolted from the inside and is sealed from the outside with sealing wax, which they're instructed to mark with a personal object like a signet ring or a pendant. The room appears to be simply impenetrable, but a cry pierces the silence of the castle that same evening and when they finally manage to break down the door they find the body of their host: the famous sword of King Arthur planted between his shoulder blades.

So there are two intriguing, closely connected and seemingly impossible situations: one of them is the retrieval of the sword from the stone and the other is the locked room murder of Pearson. I first have to comment on the sword in the stone.

I know of only one other impossible crime novel that toyed with a similar problem: The Stingaree Murders (1932) by W. Shepard Pleasants. The book takes place aboard a luxurious houseboat, floating across the Louisiana marsh country, which becomes the scene of no less than three seemingly impossible situations. Firstly, there's a stabbing on a skiff without anyone being near the victim, but the unusual knife is considered to be an important piece of evidence and is safely driven into the hardwood deck of the boat – sinking it as tightly into the woodwork as the sword in the stone. Only an axe could've relieved the knife from the deck, but the second impossibility from that book is how someone, effortlessly, plucked the knife out of the wood.

As similar as both problems appear, Halter and Pleasants both imagined completely different explanations as to how these feats were pulled off. I rather enjoyed Halter's trickery here, which I foresaw, because (somehow) a childhood memory of The Pirates of Dark Water came bubbling to the surface. One of the iconic weapons from that show made me see how the trick could be accomplished. Anyway, I found the whole sword in the stone aspect of the overall locked room trick to be fairly clever and original.

However, the locked room trick that explains the murder of Pearson, while equally clever and novel, is bugged by some noticeable problems and legitimate objections: one of them is the requirement of a pretty dense accomplice. I won't give away any spoilers, but this is a problem I also recently found in John Dickson Carr's The Ghosts' High Noon (1969). The second objection is the murderer's movements and maneuvering, which not only seems very difficult, but a near physical impossibility and can be counted as one of those physically tasking schemes that makes murder look like an Olympic sport – e.g. Agatha Christie's Towards Zero (1944), John Russell Fearn's The Crimson Rambler (1946) and Norman Berrow's The Footprints of Satan (1950). So the locked room murder might not quite convince every single reader.

Luckily, Halter did not sink all of his creative juices for this novel into the impossible situation, but also tried to write a Christie-style whodunit with a least-likely-suspect revelation towards the end – which is preceded by a story stuffed with false identities, hints of madness, family secrets and several additional murders. Nearly every part of the plot seemed to have been properly clued or foreshadowed. Halter also seemed to have tried his best to provide an answer for some of the weaknesses of the plot and one of them remained rather obvious: one that involves the past relationships of certain characters. A flaw the book shares with Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936).

So, while the plot from The Invisible Circle is far from watertight and the flat characterization did not lend itself to describe the mountain terror and breakdown of civilization, which one has come to expect from such island-bound crime novels as Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954), I still found it an immensely enjoyable detective story. Halter delivered the kind of locked room mystery I expected from Richard Forrest's Death at King Arthur's Court (2005), but that one never fully delivered on its premise.

The Invisible Circle is as imperfect as Forrest's mystery novel, but it gave you everything it promised. Not always with the same grace and ingenuity as a top-drawer Carr or Christie, but Halter delivered on the promise of a locked room novel deeply steeped in Arthurian mythology with a dash of the Queen of Crime. So I was left far from dissatisfied.

Somewhere in Time

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of dawn."

- H.G. Wells (The Discovery of the Future, 1901)

L'image trouble (The Picture from the Past, 1995) is the ninth Paul Halter novel published in English by John Pugmire's Locked Room International, which has become of inestimable value to incorrigible addicts of impossible crime stories – such as yours truly.

The Picture from the Past is partially set in the last year of the 1950s and finds Chief Inspector Archibald Hurst of Scotland Yard, accompanied by Dr. Alan Twist, in pursuit of the notorious Acid Bath Murderer, before they recede into the background of the story.  

The lion's share of the book consists of a narrative divided between the past and present, which describe apparently unrelated events, half a century apart, but they begin to intertwine and betray some astonishing parallels as the story progresses.

On the 1959 end of the story, there's John Braid and his newlywed wife, Andrea, who recently moved into their new home in the quiet village of Shapwick. John was able to afford to cough up the money their new home, but is as furtive about his job in the city as the respectable Mr. Neville St. Clair from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), which is something that's eating away at Andrea.

However, John has something else gnawing at his mind: an old photograph of a street in London from around the turn of the century. It evokes strong, unexplainable emotions. John even allows himself to be hypnotized by the shady owner of the local bric-a-brac shop to penetrate the mist enshrouded parts of memory lane, but they only manage to retrieve a few references to notes of music – and murder!

The story-line that's set in the past is written in italic and focuses on the Jacobs family, which is torn apart when three men clad in black murder Mrs. Jacobs in the streets without an apparent reason. A senseless death that was prophesized by a local soothsayer and it wouldn't be the last death he foretold.

As you might remember from past ramblings or my old review of the Jonathan Creek episode Time Waits for Norman (1998), I have a special interest in (impossible crime) stories that play around with the notion of space-and time – which Halter pulled off amazingly well for someone who's main flaw is often failing to create a sense of time and place for his (historical) settings. I loved how the echoes from the past began to manifest in the present story line, while the characters from the present discussed time travel, reincarnation, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and newspaper reports of the elusive Acid Bath Murderer. I'd like to brag that I quickly caught on how the past storyline related to the present one, which was very Carrian in nature and much appreciated.  

As to be expected from its author and niche-publisher, The Picture from the Past contains not one, but two, locked room mysteries.

In the storyline from the past, the fortuneteller, Jack Atmore, is found murdered behind the locked door and tightly shut window of his own home, but even more peculiar is the ominous letter he send himself – warning himself of his imminent death. The second impossibility is the baffling disappearance of John Braid from a partially locked-and watched set of rooms, but the solutions aren't breaking any new ground. It's even admitted in the explanation of the disappearance that's on old trick and the solution for the locked room murder was a trek across well-trodden ground. 

However, the locked room mysteries were only small side issues in a larger, over-arching plot that playfully combined two different narratives and toyed around with overlapping, parallel time-lines that managed to work in a serial killer plot in the background. Not everything is always perfectly executed or convincingly explained by Halter, but his imagination is something I have grown to admire.

The characterization seemed sharper than usual in some characters, but that appeared to depend on their importance and prominence in the story. I have said it before, but I believe Halter severely handicapped himself by setting his stories in England.

If I remember correctly, Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) is the only Halter novel I have read to date that convincingly pulled off the English setting, but that was because he visited the location before writing the book. I think problems usually bugging his work, such as an unconvincing depictions of the historical settings and English characters with a Gallic flavor, would've vanished like a magician's assistant had they been set in France – something along the lines of a Henri Bencolin-style series reminiscent of early Carr. It would've gelled better with Halter's love for the grotesque.

So, all in all, The Picture of the Past was an interesting treatment of a theme that even today remains largely unexplored and while the plot isn't picture-perfect (pun!), I can't help but admire the effort at creating a complex, time-shattering mystery.

I guess Dr. Twist summed up why I liked this story more than I should have: "you're also... attracted to the past, which fills you with nostalgia. In particular, you love the last century."

Finally, I have to thank John Pugmire for his tireless work in getting these books translated and published... only to have sit there and hear us moan about some imperfections in the plot. Forgive us, John! And know that we're aware that you're spoiling us.  

Cardinal Sins

"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.  

Previous reviews of Paul Halter's locked room mystery novels: 

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) 

Tiger's Cage

 "Aw, c'mon, you can't fool us! A genie is supposed to grant wishes."

- Louie (Duck Tales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, 1990)

Paul Halter's La tête du tigre (The Tiger's Head, 1991) is the fifth novel, alongside a dusting of collected and uncollected short stories, to be translated from French into English by our very own purveyor of miracles – John Pugmire of Locked Room International.

The first half of The Tiger's Head is divided between chapters entitled "On the Trail of the Suitcase Killer" and "The Leadenham Chronicles," in which we follow Dr. Alan Twist, Inspector Archibald Hurst and the inhabitants of a normal sleepy village before their respective problems collide in the second half. Twist and Hurst are tasked with roaming train stations for clues in a particular brutal murder case. Someone has been discarding suitcases containing the severed arms and legs of women, however, they've been unable to locate any of the heads or romps – which is not a case you'd think interest Twist. Until the "Suitcase Killer" strikes again in unfathomable circumstances.

Jenny Olsen is a flower girl of reputedly questionable virtue and was seen by her boyfriend, Tom Ross, entering her apartment in the company of a shadowy figure and flees to the nearest pub. A friend convinces him to go back and confront the bloke, but they find the door and windows secured from within. However, the lights are still on and the sound of running water can be heard. They force the front door and the place appears to be deserted, but someone turned off the water tap, made a bloody mess of the bathroom and left a suitcase behind – containing a severed set of woman's legs and arms. The murderer and the remaining body parts seem to have faded from existence!

Meanwhile, in the otherwise quiet and dormant village of Leadenham, another series of crimes are being perpetrated, but the petty thefts of chocolates, candles and hats are fairly tame in comparison with the Suitcase Murders. The best part of these so-called village chronicles is the introduction of the people who live there and those who'll be there for the second act. I have often criticized Halter's depiction of villages as nothing more than a small, tight cluster of houses where the suspects happened to be living for the purpose of the story (e.g. The Fourth Door, 1987), but here there's more of a communal feeling – even though the characterization remains on the surface. 

Major John McGregor is one of Leadenham's citizens with a bagful of tall stories and anecdotes from his days in India, which includes witnessing the famous Rope Trick in person and an account of an unsolved murder case eerily similar to the suitcase murders.

The major finds a new audience for his tales with the arrival of his nephew, Jim, who's a professional tennis player and his fiancée, Evelyn Marshall, but there's also the engaged couple of Clive Farjeon and Esther Dove and the former adopts a skeptical attitude towards the stories. One of the prized items in Major McGregor's collections of swords and daggers is in fact a bamboo cane with a lump of bronze as big as a fist and shaped like the head of a tiger, which he won from a fakir in a crooked bet. It's said that the head of the tiger is the home of an ill-tempered genie and prone to violence after being summoned, especially towards those who refused to believe in him before appearing.

Major McGregor and Clive Farjeon lock themselves up in the lounge room and every possible exit is being guarded by their friends, which does not prevent something from viciously attacking both men with the titular cane – killing the major and seriously injuring Farjeon. However, there's nobody else to be found in the room afterwards! The nature of Farjeon's wounds clears him from suspicion and the actual solution was far cleverer, original and better executed than the first locked room murder, which had an intriguing set-up but a lousy explanation.

Plot-wise, The Tiger's Head is the most complex and ambitious novel I have read from Halter since La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door), but (alas!) this intricate braided rope of plot-threads has a few weak spots and flaws. It's so complex you can understand and forgive Halter for bringing luck and coincidence into the game, which were words too often dropped by Twist in the explanation. But in the authors defense... what an imagination! However, the real flaw in Halter's works (IMHO) remains the lack of sense of time (and often a place), which is not an unimportant aspect of stories set in the past. I wonder how different the writing in these stories would've been, if they had been set in France instead of England. Anyhow...

To sum this review up, The Tiger's Head is not a novel of crime that fleshes out characters by going over every minutiae of their life, with a dash of social commentary, but a detective story that takes great pride in being elaborate for the sake of being elaborate. I liked it in spite of some of its shortcomings.

What's Plaguing Your Mind, Dr. Twist?

"Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the pledge, the magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called the turn, the magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn't clap yet, because making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back. Now you're looking for the secret."

- Cutter (The Prestige, 2006)

I have spoken disapprovingly of the people who hailed Paul Halter as the second coming of John Dickson Carr or G.K.Chesterton, because his detective stories, clever and fun as they may be, simply aren't in the same league and it was unfair to place such high expectations on non-French readers, but La Septième Hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991) may very well be a fulfillment of that prophecy – even if it's more reminiscent of Joseph Commings. If you liked The Seventh Hypothesis, you should read "Murderer's Progress," collected in Banner Deadlines (2004), as comparison material. Halter also litters the story with subtle references to Carr's work, which makes for a fun little side game.

On the other hand, Halter made a triumphant attempt in reviving that "Baghad-on-the-Thames" atmosphere of a long-gone London in The Seventh Hypothesis and the opening is a nod to Carr's The Arabian Nights Murder (1936).

Edward Watkins is a police constable to whom nothing ever happens, until the night of August 31, 1938, when he's pounding his regular beat and catches a fleeting glimpse of somebody robed in the attire of a seventeenth century plague doctor, but the night has more in store for the constable! Not long after seeing the plague doctor, Watkins bumps into a suspicious looking character referring to himself as a Doctor of Crime and appears to be in middle of a body dump, however, upon inspecting the three suspected trash bins, the constable finds nothing that shouldn't be there – such as a body or the proverbial smoking gun. Before saying adieu, Dr. Marcus (a.k.a. D.O.C.) gives Watkins a less-than-subtle hint to delve once more into the bins and actually finds a body in one that he had looked into moments ago! But an even more astonishing feat involves Dr. Marcus and the plague doctors. A couple, the Mindens, who run a seedy boarding house, come forward to report the miraculous disappearance of one of their tenants, who somehow contracted the plague and was carried away by two plague doctors, however, halfway down the corridor the patient simply dematerializes – without any place to hide or escape from.

Interestingly, the problem of the body that appeared out of nowhere and the inexplicable disappearance of the first person to be stricken down with the plague are not the main concern of The Seventh Hypothesis, but one that is brought to Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst by Peter Moore – secretary of the noted playwright of twisted mysteries, Sir Gordon Miller. Twist and Hurst listen to the account of Moore that reduces everything up to this point in the story to mere pawns on the chessboard of two devious, but criminally inclined, minds and everyone else is caught in the middle of their schemes.

This is where Paul Halter excels himself as a mystery writer. He leaves his reader with two suspects to pick from and succeeds in leaving you hanging between the two, and subsequently keeps drawing you away from the murderer. Halter has always showed how much he loved playing the grandest game in the world, but here he proved that he can come in first as the undisputed winner. I also love this steady rise in quality, but I think it would be hard to top this one. Naturally, we should not neglect to bury John Pugmire under a mountain of praise for pouring out a regular stream of first-rate translations of French impossible crime stories. I know I can be slow when it comes to new publications, but anything that comes from Locked Room International has top priority. 

Oh, the battling masterminds was so absorbing that I almost forgot to comment on, what is after all, a specialty of mine, the impossible crime – and there are two of them in The Seventh Hypothesis. I like to brag that I immediately solved the first impossibility, but than again, having watched a lot of Leverage and Hustle did make it easier than it already was. The second one was a lot trickier and complex, but not bad and what's more important, they were both well explained and properly motivated.

So... I have nothing to nitpick about this time and I think we should all give Patrick the time he needs to get accustomed to that idea. By the way, he also reviewed this book over at his blog. Go read it, if this review wasn't enticing enough. You know what... read it, anyway.

The Naughty List: A Modest Selection of Lesser-Known Holiday Mysteries

"But where are the snows of yester-year?"

- F. Villon.

I have an irregular tradition of reading holiday and winter themed mysteries around this time of the year, depending on what's easily available and how far I planned this ahead of time, and this could've been one of those off-years were it not for a few new releases and a lucky purchase. Simon de Waal and Appie Baantjer's Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012), M.P.O. Books' Dodelijke hobby (Deadly Hobby, 2012) and Mike Resnick's, Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight (1987), taking place on New Year's Eve in an alternate Manhattan, were well written nuggets of criminal ingenuity wrapped up in the magic of the season – making this officially not an off-year. I have my wish list of Christmas mysteries not yet fully worked through, but that's something for when the New Year begins to wane.

So, what then is the purpose of this blog post? Well, the idea is to compile a list of seasonal yarns of suspense and mystery that aren't all that well known, and perhaps offer one or two alternatives to (re-reading) Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972).

Pierre Véry's L'Assassinat du père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) was ferried across the language barrier in 2008 and this entry on the GADWiki, penned by fellow blogger Xavier Lechard from At the Villa Rose, identifies Véry as a literary visitor from the mainstream – who nonetheless preferred gentle surrealism over cold, stark realism. The Murder of Father Christmas attests his opinion that "what counts for an author (and for a person) is to save what has been able to remain in us as a child that we were, of that person full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery" and the story unfolds like grim, but benevolent, fairytale involving stolen gems, missing relics, Cinderella’s slipper and a murdered man in a Father Christmas costume. A lawyer on hard times, Prosper Lepicq, only two months behind on his rent for an office space crammed with impressive looking filing cabinets filled with blank dossiers and old newspapers, is requested to look into the mess. The Murder of Father Christmas has a magical, fairy tale-like quality reminiscent of Gladys Mitchell's most imaginative tales, but also their weaknesses. On the other hand, this was obviously not written as an affair of cold reasoning, but an attempt at enticing the reader to participate in a delightfully childish game of Who-dun-it? in the snow. 

DeKok en het lijk in de kerstnacht (DeKok and the Corpse on Christmas Eve, 1965) is an early (and translated) entry from A.C. Baantjer's long-running DeKok series and dribs, more than usually, with influences from Georges Simenon – making it notably different in tone and structure from the rest of the series. It’s a straight up, character-driven crime story that swirls into motion when the body of a woman emerges from the cold, murky undercurrents of the Herengracht on Christmas Eve. A grumpy DeKok, wrapped in his rumpled raincoat and formless head, joins his then even younger and more inexperienced partner, Vledder, to stalk the deserted, lantern-lit streets of Amsterdam on Christmas Eve to find the killer who ended the life of a young woman and her unborn child. Baantjer advances the plot here through character sketches, police interviews and posing moral problems, which resulted in one particular Christmas scene when DeKok has a sober (and possibly illegal) Christmas diner with a prostitute, a criminal and his victim. It's a darker story than Véry's benevolent pipedream, but if you like crime novels with a human element than you might want to pick this one up. But take note, it's not representative of the series.

The next title on the list was reviewed on here this past summer, but it was nonetheless a mystery novel draped in the traditions of the Yuletide season – mixed up with rural legends, folks dancing and ghost yarns. Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936) packs everything her fans have come to love about her imaginary tales and wrapped everything up more neatly than usual. Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley travels to Oxfordshire to spend the holidays at the pig farm of her nephew, Carey Lestrange, where a local country-lawyer of ill repute was apparently hounded to death by the local legend – a headless horseman known as the Sandford Ghost. It's nearly always a guarantee that you're getting something different from Mitchell, but when the plot is as clear as the writing, it becomes a rare treat indeed!

An English Murder (1951) is a standalone effort from "Cyril Hare," a penname for Judge Alfred Gordon Clarke, who drew on his knowledge and experience to pen a stack of detective novels. His series detectives were Inspector Mallett and the barrister Francis Pettigrew, but in An English Murder, also published as The Christmas Murder, it's a Hungarian historian, named Dr. Bottwink, who has to unravel what appears to be a fairly typical, British drawing room murder. The only real drawback I have found in Hare's books is that his plots tend to hinge on obscure laws or nearly forgotten passages of history, making it harder to completely solve them before the detective does.

Finally, I want to recommend Paul Halter's Night of the Wolf (2006), a collection of short stories, as it offers quite a few stories set during dead of winter. "The Flower Girl" and "The Abominable Snowman" are perhaps the best of the lot, entailing a homicidal snowman killing in front of witnesses and Santa Claus who may have used his magic to bump of an unpleasant, Scrooge-like figure, but also includes "The Golden Ghost" and the titular story – all set during those dark, snowy days of December.

I could extend this list further, but Micheal Innes' Lament for a Maker (1938) and Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death (1937) and The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) are probably well-known titles among the readers of this blog – and how much can you order and read in less than two weeks. Hm. Perhaps I should've put this one up a lot sooner.

Incredible How You Can, See Right Through Me!

"The devil's agent may be of flesh and blood, may they not?"

- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

I have to 'fess up that I dreaded reading Paul Halter's Le Diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) after a laudatory review, left by armchair critic Patrick At the Scene of the Crime, praising it's impossible crime element as "simple" and "dazzling effective," was followed up with a sobering notice posted on the GADWiki by Barry Ergang – saying that the solutions to a couple of the murders struck him "as a bit of a stretch" although "they weren't entirely implausible." I carefully began to tread the pages, afraid that Patrick had overenthusiastically cheered on one of his pet mystery writers, but I ended up leaning more to his opinion. However, I share Barry's reserve regarding the explanation for the invisible entity responsible for flinging a number of people from a rocky protrusion and out of an open window.

The backdrop of this book is the same as Conan Doyle used for one of the most celebrated stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Dartmoor, England, where a ghostly hound lurks on the moors before snatching one of the local gentry's down to Hell, and The Demon of Dartmoor was apparently written after Halter went down to England to soak up the atmosphere for himself. Whether it was the trip or not, but there was one visible improvement in one of his greatest weaknesses: creating a sense of time and place that I felt was lacking in the previous books. He made me believe this time that Stapleford was a small village instead of a clutter of three or four houses where the suspects live (e.g. The Fourth Door, 1987). The outdoors scenes were also very well done.

Stapleford is one of those sleepy and homely hamlets dotting the countryside that imbued Sherlock Holmes with untold horrors, "the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside," with more than enough dirty linen spilling over the laundry basket to fill one of Dr. Watson's notebooks with untold cases. In one of Sherlock Holmes' Dartmoor cases, "The Adventure of the Winged Menace," he teamed-up with Dr. John Thorndyke to investigate a series of impossible disappearances from the Moor. Evidence points to a pterodactyl as the culprit and they meet a strange bearded man, looking like a caveman in modern clothing, who threatens them bodily harm if they hurt his pterodactyl. But let's return to Halter's flight of fancies.

The Demon of Dartmoor takes off with a retrospective look at the tragic deaths of a few of Stapleford's inhabitants, three innocent teenage girls, who were flung from the top of Wish Tor, a granite spur frequently haunted by lovers, into the rushing stream below. One of the murders was witnessed and they described how the girl thrust out her arms, as if she were pushed in the back, before plummeting to her death, however, they saw nobody near the girl. Basil Hawkins even claims he saw a headless horseman riding into the sky on the day one of the girls disappeared. Skip forward a few sunsets and Stapleford welcomes actor and playwright Nigel Manson as the new owner of Trerice Manor, where a pair of invisible hands pushed a woman down a flight of stairs fifty years previously, inspiring the playwright for the inspiration for a successful stageplay entitled The Invisible Man. An impossible murder that lurks in the past is a staple of Halter's mystery fiction. 

As the be expected, the unseen murderer strikes again, this time in full view of a number of people who witness Nigel Manson being shoved out of a window by an invisible force. The local police call-in Scotland Yard, who send Inspector Archibald Hurst with Dr. Alan Twist in tow and they do an admirable job at making sense out of this nightmarish sequence of events.

The method for murdering three girls unseen after they made the climb to the top of the precipice were disappointing disenchanting, but was nonetheless thrown off the scent here like I was balancing on the edge of a cliff myself. When I learned that the victims were heard talking to an invisible companion minutes before their fatal plunge and that one of the suspects is a two-bit promoter who loves young aspiring actresses, I simply assumed that the girls were overheard rehearsing the lines he had fed them. Luring the hopeful girls to that desolate spot for a very private audition and while they took their pose on the top to begin, they got a rock flung to their heads with a slingshot (or something) and thus you have an explanation for the invisible push. Needless to say, I was wrong and didn't like any of the solutions for this portion of the story.

Nigel Manson's impossible tumble from one of the top-floor windows was a lot better explained and the solution, risky and no-success guaranteed, may impress some readers as implausible and impractical, but Halter convinced me with its deadly simplicity and even provides the murderer with a backup plan in case anything goes wrong. I had to go with Halter on this one.

On a whole, Halter did a craftsman's job of forging an engaging plot from links that rattled like a good yarn and that chain of baffling events, stretching back years, made for a satisfactory read regardless of a few weak links. I think Patrick over praised the impossible crime element of the book, but otherwise I agree with his overall opinion. Paul Halter is a problematic writer, but he was better here, as a writer, than in the previous books I have read and his commitment to the keep the cerebral detective story alive is something I really admire.

An inordinate amount of praise should also be bestowed on his translator, John Pugmire, who set-up shop for himself under the name Locked Room International and has been delivering a steady stream of content never before published on this side of the language barrier. A fifth translation, Le Cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996), is planed for late 2012 and the plot is "Halter's And Then There Were None, with a very clever impossible crime thrown in." Henri Cauvin's The Killing Needle (????) is also planned for a late 2012 release and features the French precursor to Sherlock Holmes. You can support John Pugmire to continue doing this by simply buying the books, as ebooks or paperback, and enjoy reading them. That's all.  

Oh, and my review of Jean-Paul Török's L'enigma du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) provided a blurb for that book on the back cover of The Demon of Dartmoor. Neat!

A Smattering of Crime

"Small crimes always precede great ones."

- J.P. Racine

 

Yesterday, I was condemned to kill a few hours and the gentle breeze rustling through the leaves of the trees in a sun soaked park seemed to beckon me, which would have been a perfect spot to crack open a detective story, were it not for the fact that I forgot to take one with me. Well, I remembered taking a book with me, however, I had accidentally stuffed a few magazines with me. Hey! Absentmindedness is a sure sign of genius, I think. After all, unconsciously, I had the brilliant foresight to take few random issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with me instead, part of a pile that I wanted to read for eons, so I settled down with an iced coffee, a bottle of iced water and a croissant and read the following stories.

Oh, and no. I did not spend hours reading only this handful of stories, but, after a while, there was nothing left in them I wanted to read and decided to snoop around in a nearby bookstore. But more on that in the next post and now on to the stories:  

The first of this batch of stories comes from one of today's champions of the locked room mystery, Paul Halter, whose "The Man with the Face of Clay" combines a curse, imported from the Middle East, with a miraculous murder offered up as proof. It begins when Archilles Stock tries to chalk up a lost on the record of his friend, Owen Burns, by inviting Miss White to their rooms to tell the tale of her late employer – the archeology enthusiast, Sir Jeremy Cavendish. On one of his latest digs, Sir Jeremy is cursed by one of the locals and upon his return to England he's visited by a creature, whose face resembles a grotesque mask molded from clay, after which he apparently commits suicide. The door was bolted from the inside and the French window, which was ajar, opened up on a sea of unbroken mud and freshly raked and undisturbed flowerbeds. Unfortunately, the solution is of a variety that never fails to disappoint me – no matter how well it was brought or motivated. But I have to say that Halter's strengths dominate his weaknesses when he's writing short stories. And having a good translator helps!

Keith McCarthy's "The Invisible Gunman" has another impossible crime for the reader to work their brains over: a master clock maker is shot to death in his shop and the murderer must have been his brother, they hated each other, but witnesses can place him inside his shop (across the street of his brother) at the time of the murder. Dr. Lance Elliot, his girlfriend Max and his eccentric father try to sort out this snafu. It has some clever misdirection and the solution gives us a neat twist on an otherwise hackneyed plot device. 

Norwegian author Richard Macker also penned a locked room story, "The Intell Club," in which Detective Inspector Rolf Owre takes a closer look at a suspicious suicide at a club for the intellectually gifted. The host of that night's meeting, Roger Aspvik, apparently locked himself up in the den and tasted cyanide before shooting himself. The story and setting are interesting, recalling the Columbo episode The Bye-Bye Sky-High IQ Murder Case (1977), but the solution was of exactly the same variety as the Paul Halter story.

One of the magazines also contained a re-print of Ellery Queen's "The Uncle from Australia." EQ is approached by the quintessential Australian uncle, who made a small fortune Down Under and returned to unload his wealth on either one of his two nephews or his niece. The only girl also turns out to be only one who will inherit, but her beneficiary is beginning to have second thoughts, afraid that the prospects of all that money might proof to be too tempting, and the brassy-looking Oriental paperknife in his back confirms his fears. The ending is a nod to a very famous whodunit and has the added bonus of a believable dying message.

Shamus Award winner Mike Wiecek, writing under the penname of "Mike Cooper," probed the problem of a murder committed in a hermitically sealed room, while the victim was alone, in "Whiz Bang" – which is the name of the complex where a retired billionaire was shot in a locked and moving elevator. A simple, but good, locked room mystery.

Yes, I picked the first cover for the sole reason that it has a portrait of all of the Armchair Reviewers on the front (including Carr and Boucher). The second cover is of the issue that has the Ellery Queen and Richard Macker stories.