The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999) by Paul Halter

Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) is his fifteenth mystery novel to be translated by the inestimable John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, which is a magical, dreamy and fairy tale-like detective story with several impossible crimes – something of a cross between Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Death and the Maiden, 1947) and Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947). An uncommon combination that worked better than expected!

Mark Reeder is an absent-minded journalist with the habit of forgetting his car-keys, papers or "who-knows-what else" and his editor calls him a man with his head in the clouds. This is the literal truth. Reeder loves clouds and "could spend hours watching them."

So when he lost an article that was due to go to the printers, his editors told him to take his annual leave and he packed his bags, jumped in his car and followed the clouds – which brought him to the village of Pickering. Upon his arrival, Reeder laid eyes on "the most exquisite creature" he has ever seen, Stella, who's the daughter of the late lamented John Deverell. A local artist who committed suicide two years ago.

Reeder is told by one of the villages that Stella "a bit special" and appears to possesses the magical abilities of a real-life fairy!

Stella was born in "a house haunted by moaning winds," which was build on top of a hill overlooking "the sea-lashed reefs" below, where the never-ending winds play like "the mournful screeching of a demented violin." The wind blows there all the time and has taken many lives over the centuries. However, Stella emerged from that haunted, wind-blown place with the ability to become invisible, as is she was carried away by the wind – something that often happens when she enters a small copse called the Fairy Wood. At first, the villagers assumed there was hiding place in the copse, but nobody has been able to find it.

The village policemen even set a trap for her by staking out the copse and she managed to completely disappear from "inside a guarded perimeter," but these are not the only miracles she performed. Stella can turn stones into gold simply rubbing them and predict the future. She predicted the deaths of three villagers.

So, having heard all of these stories, Reeder decides to enlist the help of Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst, who witness first-hand how Stella turns ordinary stones into cold and accurately predicts the death of three men. One of these men died in front of Reeder under baffling, seemingly impossible circumstances. Reeder saw with his own eyes how this man began to fight with the wind, which was blowing furiously, when he was suddenly plucked from the ground by "a violent gust" – simply disappeared into the darkness. As enticing as all these miraculous events are, they do not represent the best aspects of the plot. And they have very simplistic answers. You might be surprised to learn that I didn't care about that at all here.

The Man Who Loved Clouds is a superbly imagined and wonderfully executed detective story, in which the splendid who-and why of the plot were marvelously intertwined with the more wondrous plot-threads of the story. Plot-wise, this is easily one of Halter's best mystery novels on par with La septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) and La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005). But the dreamy, fairy tale-like story-telling is what turned this book into something truly great and memorable.

One of Halter's compatriots and fellow mystery writer, Pierre Véry, once commented that "what counts for an author (and for a person) is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were." A child "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery," but "so pure, so pure." Halter did exactly that and The Man Who Loved Clouds is, what Véry would call, "a fairy tale for grown-ups."

I believe Véry would have liked The Man Who Loved Clouds and Halter's story-telling here is, in spirit, very close to the only detective novel I have read from Véry's own hands, namely L'assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934), which is also a (minor) impossible crime story with that wondrous, fairy tale-like atmosphere. Now I want to re-read it more than ever before. And, hey, just look at the time of the year! ;)

My sole complaint, which is a very minor one, is that the book-title is a bit of a misnomer and a better title was suggested in the story. Reeder described Stella as "the daughter of the wind" and that would been a more fitting book-title, but, other than that, this was an excellent, imaginative and memorable detective story. I have struggled with Halter in the past, but it's detective stories like these that makes it perfectly understandable why JJ feverishly rants and raves about his work. 

The Man Who Loved Clouds is recommended without reservations.

Devil's Soil: Halter, Hoch and Hoodwinks

I know my blog is dominated by locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, which tends to come at the expense of regular detective stories, but the monster that Edgar Allan Poe created still has me firmly in its grip. Just like Vincent, "I'm possessed by this house and can never leave it again." Nevertheless, I do want to spread out my locked room reading in the future, but until then, I crossed two more short stories from my to-read list. Stories by two modern-day champions of the impossible crime story whose dedication and output rivaled that of the master, John Dickson Carr.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Devil's Orchard" was originally published in the January, 2006 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and will be collected for the very first time in the forthcoming Challenge the Impossible: The Last Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (20??) – published by Douglas Greene of Crippen & Landru. A collection of short stories representing the closing chapters on a long-running series that was fully dedicated to the impossible crime story, but we can be downcast about this when the time comes.

"The Problem of the Devil's Orchard" takes place during Labor Day weekend of 1943, when the tide of the war in Europe was turning in favor of the Allies, but the war was not the only thing occupying the people of the New England town of Northmont. A young man had miraculously vanished from an apple orchard.

Phil Fitzhugh only recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday, works at the feed store of his family and is dating a girl, Lisa Smith, whom he intends to marry, but her folks won't hear of it. Phil became frantic when he finally received his draft notice.

So Lisa turned to Dr. Sam Hawthorne for help, who enlisted the assistance of Sheriff Lens, but after they pick a drunk Phil up at a bar, where he was "acting a bit unsteady," he escapes from Hawthorne's car and flees into Desmond's Orchard – known locally as the Devil's Orchard. The hundred-acre apple orchard is believed to be haunted and attracts "arcenous children," which is why the owner erected two, eight-feet chain-link fences topped by barbwire. Phil was completely trapped inside the orchard, but a subsequent search by fifty workers only turned up a blood-smeared shirt. And the strip of bare soil along the fences was soft enough to show footprints. Only problem is that the earth showed no signs of having been stood on. So how did he vanish from a locked and watched apple orchard?

Hoch has a deserved reputation of usually delivering one of the better, if not the best, short story in any mystery anthology that he's a part of, but this is not one of his finest pieces of impossible crime fiction.

The clues and hints to the solution where all there, like the stone that was found on the bloody shirt, but the fair play could disguise that the impossibility was weak and uninspired. An explanation that should have been used as a false, throw-away solution. Unworthy of Hoch, the King of the Short Detective Story.

So, now we go from one modern locksmith of the impossible crime story, who's no longer among us, to another artisan who still very much alive.

An English translation of Paul Halter's "The Robber's Grave" first appeared in the June, 2007 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and was translated, as always, by John Pugmire of Locked Room International. The story is a charming one and can be compared to the kind of impossible crime stories from Carter Dickson's The Department of Queer Complaints (1940).

Dr. Alan Twist had taken his car to escape the noisy, bustling city of London and lose himself in "the peaceful English countryside," but had ended up in a "desolate spot" across "the border of darkest Wales." There he stumbles into an inn and listens to the story of a nearby grave site where grass refuses to grow.

A hundred years ago, Idris Jones was denounced by "a couple of blackguards," who claim to have seen him rob and beat a beggar to death, but, despite his heated denials, Jones was hanged as a murderer. On his way to the gallows, Jones asked God not to allow "a blade of grass ever to grow over his grave" and the grass over his grave did turn yellow and then disappeared. And that's the last time green was seen on that patch of ground. An attempt to find a logical and natural explanation has driven a developer out of the village.

A property developer from Bristol, Evans, had bought the land and wanted to turn the grounds into a golf course, but you don't want your patrons to come across a haunted grave when they're doing a relaxing round of golf. So he vowed "to break the ancient curse" or "abandon the project." Evans went to a lot of trouble to prove it was all a trick or misunderstanding.

Evans removed the earth to a considerable depth and replaced it with rich, seeded loam, but the grass had scarcely began to grow when it began to turn yellow, died and a bare patch outlining a grave – which only made him double his efforts. The earth was replaced again and Evans hired the best gardeners in the region, but when even this failed he began to suspect sabotage from the locals. So he built a wall around the fence with a metal grille serving as a gate. Guards and dogs watched over this small fortress and the earth inside was, once again, replaced. But all to no avail. The grass refused to grow.

A good and novel impossible situation with a neat, simple and believable explanation that also betrayed the author is undeniably French.

I believe these type of peculiar problems and unusual impossibilities work best, as is demonstrated here, when the problem-solver of the story acts purely as an armchair detective who listens to these extraordinary accounts and then reasoning a logical answer from that same armchair – doing all of the work in his head. "The Robber's Grave" is not strictly an armchair story, because Twists does leave his seat, but he pretty much functions as one. And he figures out the method when he recalled a mean-spirited prank he played on a nasty neighbor as a child.

So we have a good, fun little detective story and another that began promising, but ended up being underwhelming. Well, we'll have to do with that, I guess, and I'll return with some non-impossible crime novels from the likes of Christopher Bush, E.R. Punshon and perhaps Erle Stanley Gardner. So stay tuned.

The Vampire Tree (1996) by Paul Halter

John Pugmire of Locked Room International published an English translation of Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) in December, 2016, but decided at the time to give the book a pass, because I remembered a damning review that was posted on the now erstwhile forum of the JDCarr website – lambasting everything from the weak plot to the illogical behavior of the cardboard characters. So even at the time, when Halter was still an inaccessible enigma behind the language barrier, I was not enticed by this particular title.

My initial plan to give The Vampire Tree a pass began to fell by the wayside shortly after reading La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), which was a good take on the "room that kills" and actually left me wanting to read another Halter. And that left me with only one option.

So how bad could the book really be, I reasoned. After all, I also recall some negative reviews of Carter Dickson's Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) that suggested the entire plot consisted of H.M. chasing prostitutes and stabbing dodgy, low-life characters in the streets of Tangier – which you have to agree is an unfair assessment of the book. Sure, Behind the Crimson Blind is still at the bottom of the H.M. series, alongside with And So to Murder (1940) and Seeing is Believing (1941), but it was still very readable mystery. I had the hope that this much maligned title by Halter would turn out to have a similar upside.

Well, that was not the case and somewhat regret my decision. The Vampire Tree is almost as poor a detective story as Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1994). Yes... this is going to be one of those reviews.

The Vampire Tree does have all the necessary ingredients of an arch-typical Paul Halter detective novels, "legends, witches, ancient crimes, sadism, premonitory nightmares," while the past and present begin to inextricably intertwine. Naturally, one of the crimes is of the seemingly impossible variety and occurred a hundred years before the opening of the story. Unfortunately, Halter was unable here to produce the same result as he did in previously mentioned The Madman's Room or L'image trouble (The Picture from the Past, 1995). But let's begin at the beginning.

The main story-line takes place in the 1950s and concerns a newlywed couple, Roger and Patricia Sheridan, who were world's apart, but had one thing in common – neither of them had any close relatives. Patricia was orphaned during the London Blitz during the Second World War and Roger inherited "a comfortable future" from his wealthy parents. An inheritance that included the remnants of an ancestral mansion that stands in the village of Lightwood, in Suffolk, which Roger fixed up to serve as "the cosy nest of their dreams." However, the place has a peculiar history of its own that will come back to haunt them.

During the reign of Henry VIII or his son Edward, the village was plagued by "a series of child murders" and the person who was held responsible was an apparently young and beautiful woman. Liza Gribble had the face and body of a young woman, but the wrinkled hands of an old crone. So the villagers assumed she was not only witch, but a vampire as well and she had drank the blood of her victims to become a youthful-looking woman again. Gribble was hanged and buried beneath the titular tree. A tree that stands on the grounds of the Sheridan residence and played a role in another murder case that took place a hundred years ago.

One of Roger's great-grand-uncles, Eric, became engaged to the daughter of a neighboring landowner, Lavinia, who died mad when Eric was murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances. On a harsh winter evening, they threw a ball at the Sheridan home and it was a great success, but when Lavinia went to sleep that night she had a terrifying nightmare about the menacing, twisted tree coming alive and strangling her fiancé, which became reality when she found his body the following morning sprawled beneath the tree – strangled him to death. But the peculiar, inexplicable part is that there was only a single set of footprints in the virgin snow and they belonged to Eric!

Patricia had a similar nightmare the first time she slept in the house and decided to read Lavinia's diary, which becomes somewhat of an obsession and she's not the only one. Roger begins to develop a habit of calling her Lavinia. And then there's the present-day murder case. A serial killer who targets children, slits their throats and disposes of their drained bodies in the wooded area surrounding the village.

On paper, The Vampire Tree had all the potential to become a good, if not excellent, detective novel, but Halter evidently did not have his head in the game and was unable to bring any of the plot-threads to a satisfying conclusion. And this exemplified in the ineptitude of Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst. You've to wonder why Halter decided to include them, instead of making this a standalone novel, because they're completely useless here. Twist even admits towards the end that he considers "the case to have been one of my failures" and he only got "a glimpse of the truth."

Only contribution Twist made to the case was explaining Patricia's phobia of bright lights and why she had an "insurmountable fear of touching crosses," but it was Patricia who eventually hit upon an explanation for the impossible murder that occurred there over a century ago – which (alas) was an extremely poor one. I also loath this type of solution for any kind of locked room murder or impossible crime. I'd rather a writer use hidden passages, poisonous animals or a long-lost twin to explain a miraculous murder than spring this kind of explanation on me. An explanation that completely destroys the essence of an impossible crime. On top of that, it was also badly executed, poorly motivated and required some (natural) fortuity to work.

So I was not exactly impressed by the impossible crime element of The Vampire Tree and was even surprised that Pugmire, who specializes in publishing locked room mysteries, picked this one to translate. I'm sure it has something to do with publishing rights, but this is the kind of book that would chase away new readers who picked up because the title sounded intriguing.

Anyway, the plot-thread of the present-day serial killer proved only to be slightly better, but not much, which had an interesting motive that was actually foreshadowed and this allowed the reader to make an educated guess about the murderer's identity. Not exactly old-fashioned fair play, but Halter did drop a couple of good hints and (admittedly) the reason why the killer drained the children of their blood showed Halter could be clever and original. As did the double-alibi of the murderer. However, this was hardly enough to save the book and there's another thing about the solution that annoyed me more than anything else in the story.

Early on in the book, Patricia meets an elderly man on the train, Thomas Fielding, who travels to historical or haunted places in order to soak in the atmosphere and this personal interest helped him to "formally identify the perpetrator" – or, rather, he "sensed" the truth. However, Fielding only went around telling people he knew who was behind the child killings, but the only precaution he took was sending a letter to Dr. Twist. A letter that arrived too late, but here's the kicker: in the letter he told Twist he fully expected to be murdered by the man he had refused to tell everyone about. He actually suspected this person to silence him and he let it happen without lifting as much as a finger. And even worse, his death did nothing to help capture the murderer. What an idiot.

I believe the last time people vainly sacrificed themselves, like that, was when Aztec men mounted the steps of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan to voluntarily have their hearts cut of their chest in an attempt to stop the Spanish conquest.

So, to make a long story short, I very much disliked The Vampire Tree. Halter has always been an uneven mystery writer and plotter, who tends to divide opinions, but The Vampire Tree is far below the dozen, or so, titles that preceded it in translation. Halter can do so much better and hope the next one, which will probably be published later this year, is a return to that Halter. And I'll try to pick something better for my next post.

If you want a second-opinion on this book, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, wrote a more nuanced review.

The Room With Something Wrong

"There's no bogey in that room. But there was—and may still be—death in it."

- Lord Mantling (Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders, 1935)

Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990) is the fourth recorded case of his primary series-characters, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst, which has recently been translated and published by the proprietor of Locked Room International, John Pugmire – who recently also edited and published a massive locked room anthology entitled The Realm of the Impossible (2017). But I'll get to that One Thousand and One Nights of miraculous crimes and impossible problems later this month.

So, for now, let's take a gander at The Madman's Room, which is Halter's take on the "room that kills" variety of the (semi) impossible crime. However, I should note here that the book has been tagged by everyone as a locked room mystery, but the plot is actually a how-was-it-done centered around a cursed room (c.f. John Dickson Carr's "The Devil's Saint" from The Dead Sleep Lightly, 1983). I decided not to tag this blog-post as a locked room or impossible crime.

The cursed room here is part of "a well-proportioned XVIIth century stone construction," named Hatton Manor, of which the oldest part had been built by "a knight who fought in the Hundreds' Years War" and witnessed Joan of Arc being burned at the stake – a horrifying spectacle that continued to haunt him upon his return to England ("we burnt a saint"). Some believe that the guilt-ridden knight went mad and burned down the original structure, but he would not be the last person to lose his mind on that premise.

At the end of the 19th century, Hatton Manor was the home of Stephan Thorne and his family, which included a brother, Harvey, who had the promise of "a future literary genius." Harvey had been given his own room on the upper floor where night after night, year after year, he filled "ream after ream of paper." After two years, Harvey had completed a bulky, handwritten manuscript, but when his father read the manuscript a change came over him, grew ill and passed away. Everyone else who read the manuscript was left in a state of shock and Harvey was ordered to never take his accursed writing out of his room ever again.

Needless to say, Harvey was not pleased by the response his masterpiece received and, in turn, his relatives began to shield him from the outside world, because his mind was clearly unbalanced and he became a recluse in his private room – everyone who crossed the threshold was seized by "a curious and indefinable sense of unease." One day, cries were heard coming from the room and they discovered Harvey angrily convulsing on the ground. He died only a few minutes later, but left them with the chilling words they "will perish in fire" for their sins. Curiously, there was a wet patch on the carpet in front of the fireplace.

And not long after his passing, nearly the entire family perished in a fire and Stephan's pregnant wife, Rosemary, ordered Harvey's room to be permanently sealed.

The room remained sealed for decades. Until one of the two grandsons of Stephan and Rosemary, Harris Thorne, relocated his (extended) family to the manor house, which includes his wife, Sarah, and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Hilton. But also his brother-in-law, Francis Hilton, and his wife, Paula. Up to that point, the only residents of Hatton Manor had been Harris' brother, Brian, who lives there as a reclusive clairvoyant with a couple of servants.

Over the course of this story, Brain makes several astonishingly accurate predictions about love, money and misfortune. And the later pertains to his brother's decision to reopen the sealed room and use it as a private study. Shortly after the room is reopened, Harris is found beneath the open window of his study, in the rock garden below, with a fatal wound to his head. Even more eerily, there's a wet patch on the carpet. Just like what happened when his great-uncle Harvey died around the turn of the century!

First Floor Floorplan of Hatton Manor

So, there you have it. The premise of a classical, baroque-style detective story that could have been imagined during the genre's golden days and have to highlight two particular aspects of the plot I found to be absolutely endearing.

When Dr. Twist and Hurst discuss the peculiar circumstances surrounding Harris Thorne's apparent suicide, the later mentions that a secret passage had been found in the room. A passage that lead to the adjacent storeroom. However, the thick layer of dust on the storeroom floor demonstrated that nobody had entered it in many years. 

Usually, these kind of secret passages are mentioned, but turn out not to exist, or offered as a completely underwhelming and disappointing answer to a locked room mystery, but never are they actually found and then eliminated – which is something I always wanted to happen for a change. Just have someone come across a hidden passage, or small cubbyhole, at the crime-scene only to have it eliminated as an entrance and exist (like it being bricked up or something).

So kudos to Halter for using the hidden passageway without incorporating it into the solution of the madman's room!

Secondly, I found the attempt on Halter's part to write a more character-driven detective novel to be adorable. Halter is not a mystery writer known for creating believable, three-dimensional characters and this book is no different in that regard, but the characters, or their actions, are given more consideration here. A good example of this is the prologue, which showed Paula had an intimate friendship with detective by the name of Patrick Nolan. A character who would later turn up in the story again to play a vital role in the unraveling of the mysteries that have plagued Hatton Manor for generations.

Nevertheless, Halter is not exactly a Christianna Brand in the character-department and, consequently, his cast-of-characters were only the proverbial cogs in the engine of the plot – who all played their part in "a chain reaction of events." Luckily, those events formed a pretty good, if somewhat imperfect, detective story.

You can compare The Madman's Room to La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005), which had an excellent central problem and solution about a vanishing street, but was completely unconvincing when it came to explaining the visions from the past and future. The Madman's Room has similar strengths and weaknesses.

As a strength, you can point to the delightful back-story of the titular room and the maddening problem posed by the wet patches that appear on the carpet after each incident. The answer Halter provided for these wet patches was very clever indeed and represents the strongest strand in the twisted coil of plot-threads, which I was unable to figure out for myself (I did figure out who-and why). 

On the weaker side, we have a shaky alibi that was created from "scratch in mere minutes" and someone has called, what made this alibi possible, ridiculously convenient. And I have to agree with that observation. I was also slightly underwhelmed by the answers that explained the divination's of Brian Thorne.

So, while the plot was a mixed bag of tricks, I still tremendously enjoyed my time with the book as a whole, which offered a fun, tricky and solvable detective story. To give you an exact idea where I stand on The Madman's Room, I can point to two other reviews of the book. My fellow locked room enthusiast, "JJ," awarded the book a full five-stars, while Sergio of Tipping My Fedora only gave the book two-and-a-half tips. If I used a similar rating-system, I would give The Madman's Room a solid three-and-a-half points. And that's not too shabby, I think.

Anyway, I better cut this already overlong, rambling review here and tell you that the next post will be about a small, little-known short story collection by a mystery writer who has been mentioned quite often on this blog. Oh, and this collection might contain one or two impossible crime stories. What a surprise!

Dinner of the Dead

"Because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not."

- Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, 1935)

Paul Halter's La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) is his twelfth detective novel to be translated into English by John Pugmire, a modern-day merchant of miracles, which marked the second appearance of Halter's primary series-characters, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst – who made their first bow in the preceding book, La quatriéme porte (The Fourth Door, 1987). Well, Hurst was only mentioned in passing by Dr. Twist, but that is a mere trifle of a detail.

Pugmire published the English edition of Death Invites You early last year and it has earned the dubious honor of being liked by Halter's most persistent detractors. For example, Brad of the Ah, Sweet Mystery blog exclaimed, "EURAKA! Found a Halter I Like," which is a read he described as "a very enjoyable ride." 

So when even one of his most persistent critics managed to turn out a positive review, I decided to give a pass to the widely-panned L'arbre aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) and move this particular item to the upper regions of the big pile. But does my take on the book concur with popular opinion? Let's find out!

The opening chapter of Death Invites You finds Dr. Twist and Hurst drinking a beer in a London pub, while the latter complains that "criminals aren't what they used to be" and laments the passing of "the age of the master criminal." Dr. Twist is not as pessimistic as his policeman friend, because "a particularly tricky case usually turns up" when the inspector talks like that and, as if on cue, they spot a police officer at the bar, Sergeant Simon Cunningham – a promising young man who played a vital role in capturing the "Lonely Hearts Killer." 

Cunningham is engaged to Valerie Vickers and she is the daughter of a famous mystery writer, Harold Vickers, who's the leading practitioner of the locked room mystery! Vickers is an eccentric man, stoic and prone to mood swings, and often locked himself in his study for days on end when working on a book. So Cunningham was more annoyed than surprised when he received an invitation from his future father-in-law to a very important dinner, which had to be kept secret even from Valerie. A dinner that forced him to cancel a date with a very disappointed Valerie.

A second invitation was dispatched to a newspaper reporter, Fred Springer, who's also "a renowned critic of crime fiction," but when they arrive at the home of Vickers they learn from Mrs. Vickers that her husband has one of his customary spells inside his locked office – where he has not emerged from for the better part of two days. The repeated knocks on the door are not answered and there's "an undeniable odour of chicken" emanating from the locked office. So they decide to charge the door, but when it gave way they tumbled into an otherworldly scene.

The body of Harold Vickers, seated on one of three chairs, is slumped over a table sumptuously prepared for three people. Silver plates are filled with salmon, vegetables, roasted chickens, cheese, grapes, bottles of Burgundy and stuffed pheasants flanked by silver candelabras – beautifully illuminating the macabre scene with their flickering flames. A bullet hole was visible in the right temple, but the rest of Vickers' head was submerged in a large frying pan of boiling oil, which disfigured both his face and hands.

The scene alone would pose a mind-bending challenge to Dr. Twist and Hurst, but there are other complicating factors. One of them is the inexplicable presence of a half-filled goblet of water standing beneath the window or how the crime-scene resembles the premise of both the victim's next book as well as an unsolved murder case from 1907.

Or what to think about the suspects: Vickers has a brother-in-law, Roger Sharpe, who's a stage magician and acted as a technical adviser on his locked room stories. He probably knows how to pull off such an elaborate and deadly illusion. There's a second daughter, Henriette, who can best be described as soft in the head and disliked her own father as much as she loved her late grandfather – whose lingering memory haunts the investigation. Vickers also has a twin brother, living in Australia (where else?), who went missing en route to England, which naturally adds yet another possibility to the complicated investigation. Finally, there's "a strange next door neighbor," Dr. Colin Hubbard.

And there you have it! All the ingredients necessary to write a first-rate detective story: a mouthwatering premise, a banquet of clues and a dinner table full of suspects, but what we got instead strongly resembled the plot of a relative well-known short story.

Robert Arthur's "The 51st Sealed Room," collected in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982), tells of the gruesome killing of a mystery novelist, specialized in locked room stories, whose headless body is found inside a sealed cabin, propped up in front of his typewriter, with his severed head placed on the topshelf of a bookcase – as if it overlooked the bizarre scene of his own murder. Unfortunately, all of the clues and the setting of the scene were revealed to be nothing more than red herrings planted in order to muddle the waters. The murderer staged an elaborate and bizarre crime-scene purely to mystify the investigators. Only the solution to the locked room proved to be relevant to the plot. Same is kind of true for Death Invites You.

The sumptuously prepared meal, the water-filled goblet and the burned features only served to mystify without rhyme or reason. You can't help but feel disappointed about that. Since you expect a John Dickson Carr fanboy, like Halter, to come up with at least a halfhearted attempt to provide a logical answer to all of these so-called clues. On top of that, the murderer was not particularly well-hidden, either, but (to be honest) neither was my identification of this character picture-perfect, because I assumed the obvious murderer was an obvious red herring and the obvious red herring the obvious murderer. 

In my defense, there was something in the narrative, early on, that put me on the wrong track and may not have been entirely fair. Anyhow, I switched to the correct murderer when the motive became clear to me, which was nicely worked into the overall plot. As a matter of the fact, the motive may very well be the best worked out aspect of the story.

Gratefully, the locked room situation was also not entirely without interest and the technical nature of the trick, alongside with the motive, placed the book closer to the works of S.S. van Dine than to Carr's – especially his locked room novels (e.g. The Kennel Murder Case, 1932). I know the mere mention of Van Dine will probably make some of you curl your upper lip in disgust, but The Kennel Murder Case is, in my experience, the best and most readable title in the Philo Vance series. So it should not be taken as a slight towards Halter.

Well, I feel very divided about Death Invites You. On the one hand, I feel disappointed, even cheated, by the sumptuous banquet of red herrings that only served to (unfairly) obfuscate a relatively simple and straightforward plot. You can argue it served as plot dressing, but when you present such a crime-scene in a classical-styled locked room mystery, I expect at least an attempt at a logical answer. On the other hand, the story moved along nicely and the murderer, in combination with the motive, fitted together logically with murders. And the locked room trick was not bad either.

The end result is a middling effort that is miles ahead of Le roi du desordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1994) and ranks roughly alongside Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996), but is left in the dust by Halter's best impossible crime novels – such as La septiéme hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) and La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005).

Personally, I would not recommend the book, like "JJ" did, to people who are new to Halter, but readers who are already familiar with his flaws will probably be able to appreciate the story and forgive some of its short comings. After all, the book is a fun, quick read with the biggest flaw being that it did not delivered on all its promises. Since some of the criticism leveled at Halter is that he tries to deliver on the promises of a fantastic premise (e.g. Le brouillard rouge, 1988; The Crimson Fog), I can understand why readers like Brad liked Death Invites You. 

Well, I rambled on long enough in this slightly muddled blog-post and hope everyone can put up with a few more locked room reviews, but after the next three or four posts I will mix things up again.

A Pathway Through Time

"But suppose a whole street disappeared, a whole thoroughfare blotted from London. What could be more fantastic?"

- Henri Bencolin (John Dickson Carr's The Lost Gallows, 1931)

Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) is his tenth novel to be carried across the language barrier by John Pugmire, founder of Locked Room International, which is the fourth entry in the Frenchman's series about Owen Burns and Achilles Stock – both of whom previously appeared in Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1996) and Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997). They also appeared in a couple of short stories, "The Flower Girl" and "The Cleaver," collected in La nuit du loup (Night of the Wolf, 2000).

Owen Burns is reportedly modeled on Oscar Wilde, "a dandy aesthete who appreciates murder as a fine art," but the opening chapter of The Phantom Passage finds Burns as bored as Sherlock Holmes in the first pages of "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, 1917). Burns condemns the city of London as a town "born out of boredom and desolation" and a place where all "the phantoms of the planet" come to retire. However, his friend and personal chronicler, Achilles Stock, remembered him stating the exact opposite and something was actually happening on the fog-bound streets of Edwardian-era London: a convicted murderer, Jack Radcliffe, escaped from prison and the police is out in full force – most of their activity taking place practically underneath their windowsill.

But the problems that are about to be visited upon them are only slightly connected to the manhunt for the escaped convict.  

Ralph Tierney is an American diplomat and an old acquaintance of Burns, whom he met during his stay at the University of Chicago, but the Tierney had the rotten luck to bear a striking resemblance to Radcliffe. As a result, he has been hounded by the police through "a labyrinth of dark alleys and passageways," but what he witnessed in one of these streets made him decide to fetch the help of his old friend. When Tierney wandered into a dark, obscure passageway, called Kraken Street, a madman wearing a large coat and a battered top hat approached him.

The man guided Tierney pass the bend of the street, to a hovel, where two equally peculiar characters were sitting on the porch: a woman in red, "Vivian the fairy," and a blind fruit seller, but since he was completely worn and tired he accepted the offer of a room and bed – which is where he found "a strange room" with a view. Tierney saw a peculiar light in the window, but what he saw through it was even stranger: a violent scene from what appeared to be the past. Something that appears to have taken place decades ago.

So after the vision began to blur and merge with the blackness of the night, Tierney did what most people would've done in his place: he turned around and left cartoon smoke. However, when he was just outside of the passage he wanted to light a cigarette, but discovered he probably lost his lighter at the hovel, but Kraken Street had disappeared! The passageway from which he had just emerged was now "a high brick wall without any openings." As if "the shadows had swallowed it."

They soon uncover Tierney was not the first person to wander into the passage and witnessed its visionary power in the upstairs room, which even caught the attention of both the newspaper and the police. One newspaper reporter described the phantom passage as "a monstrous serpent" coiled "between houses and only appearing when it was in search of a victim." 

This is a nice piece of Carrian imagery on Halter's part and the plot-thread that concerns this haunted passage represents the strongest part of the plot, because Halter provided an explanation that did not traverse the expected route for this kind of impossibility.

As we know from such large-scale impossible crime stories as Ellery Queen's "The Lamp of God," collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), and Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop (1945) there's a definite limit to the variety of explanations one can propose to the explain the miraculously disappearance of a large, stationary house – which is why so few mystery writers tried their hands at it. And probably why there are less than a handful about entire streets being blotted from existence.

So Halter should be commended for not only venturing out in this infrequently traversed side street of the impossible crime story, but also for dreaming up a clever and satisfying explanation that was very different from the other solutions I've seen for disappearing houses and streets. Halter's explanation also made me feel slightly embarrassed over my initial suspicion of the brick wall. I suspected the alley might have been privately owned property (used for nefarious activities) and the entrance had a drawbridge-like "door," which looked like a blind wall when raised and resembled pavement when lowered. It sounds idiotic, I know, but how many ways can you think of to remove an entire street from the map? Luckily, Halter found a different method to accomplish this feat.  

Anyway, there are several murders, suicides and disappearances connected to the phantom passage, which were often brought to light or predicted by the lighted window of the dingy hovel. I appreciated what Halter tried to do with these plot-threads and they did make for some pleasing patterns in the overarching plot, but this aspect of the book was marred by the slender clueing – making it very difficult to arrive at exactly the same conclusion as Burns. I can look pass that in this instance, because Halter already gave the reader a wondrous and original impossible situation.

However, I was not so charmed about the explanation for visions from the past and future. I guess it was to be expected, but I think Halter went a bit far when suggesting that some of the effects could be achieved with cigar smoke. So, no, I was not impressed with this part of the plot and Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of the Crystal Gazer," from Best Thinking Machine Detective Stories (1973), is a better example of this kind of impossibility – as far-fetched as the story may be.

So these three aspects of The Phantom Passage demonstrate why so many of us have a love-hate relationship with Halter, but, overall, I enjoyed this one. If only for the wonderful and excellent treatment of the vanishing street.

On a side note, I want to point out there's one aspect of the solution that was anticipated in a series of episode from Tantei Gakuen Q (Detective Academy Q), namely The Kamikakushi Village Murders, which begins with a prologue (ep. 16) and takes up the next five episode. I won't say what it is, but you should recognize a very interesting idea that was used for something completely different in those episodes.

Finally, you might want to take a peek at my previous blog-post, which is a review of an episode from Blacke's Magic and also deals with the problem of a vanishing street. So that's all for now. My next review or blog-post will probably not be that of a locked room mystery, but no promises there.