Critical Acclaim

-EQMM December 2006  "The Jury Box" by Jon L. Breen:
**** Paul Halter: The Night of the Wolf, translated from the French by John Pugmire and Robert Adey, Wildside, $45 limited hardcover, $12.95 trade paper.
   The first collection in English by a contemporary French master will delight those who long for the locked rooms and impossible crimes of John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and G. K. Chesterton. Of the nine, the title story and two others have appeared in EQMM's  Passport to Crime department.

-Mystery Scene November/December 2006, by Brian Skupin:
Locked Room ReduxThe Night of the Wolf  by Paul Halter  Wildside Press, November 2006, $12.95 tr. pb.
   Paul Halter, a Frenchman, has been writing locked room and impossible crime mysteries for 20 years. This collection of short stories, some of which have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is the first book to be translated into English thanks to the efforts of locked room guru Bob Adey and translator John Pugmire.   Following firmly in the footsteps of John Dickson Carr, Halter offers murder in a locked, inaccessible tower, ghostly disturbances in a sealed crypt, and several versions of his specialty - murder in an area of unmarked snow with no apparent way for the murderer to approach or leave the scene of the crime. The star of the collection is the title story, which provides a brand-new solution to this classic puzzle. In this and a number of other stories Halter demonstrates that the impossible crime subgenre still has plenty of life. Unlike many other stories in recent years, these situations really do seem impossible, and the "aha!" moment when the solution is revealed is genuinely satisfying.     In what is probably a tip of the hat to Carr and other favorite Golden Age writers, Halter sets nearly all his stories in England (not entirely convincingly), and tries to evoke an atmosphere of unsettling creepiness to complement the strangeness of the situations. This doesn't always come off, but it does succeed nicely in several places.    This is the most important collection of locked room stories in years, and fans of brilliant puzzles or the Crippen & Landru Lost Classics series will love it.

-Deadly Pleasures  Spring 2007, "It's About Crime" by Marv Lachman:
   Lovers of the Golden Age impossible crime/locked room mystery of the John Dickson Carr variety should look for Paul Halter's THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF (Wildside Press, trade paperback $12.95). Halter is  French writer whose stories have appeared in EQMM. Three of those stories are reprinted; the other seven are new to me. All ten qualify as impossible crime stories, and in at least three Halter rings variations on a favorite Carr device: the snow fall where there should be footprints leading up to the crime scene, but there are not.      There is some awkwardness in the telling of these stories. Often, they are narrated by someone telling of past events that, in turn, were related to him. Yet almost all have a beginning that "hooks" one. Halter doesn't always have the ability to resolve what he has created with his bizarre circumstances and some endings disappoint. Not so "The Flower Girl," which opens on a snowy London evening in 1903 and proves to be the best impossible crime story I've read in years. It's almost worth the cost of the book by itself, but there are other good stories to recommend, including one called "Rippermania," for those who can't get enough about our Jack.

-Publisher's Weekly January 8, 2007
Passports to Crime: The Finest Mystery Stories from International Crime Writers
   Hutchings assembles another winning anthology (after 2004's Ellery Queen Presents Great Mystery Novellas) with this collection of 26 mystery stories in translation, representing 15 countries and 11 languages and chosen from a 3-year old monthly series in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The selection includes most of the subgenres - noirs, whodunits, procedurals and thrillers - and though few of the authors will be familiar to mainstream readers, the writing is uniformly excellent. Russian Boris Akunin, who is probably the best known, contributes "Table Talk, 1882," in which his series sleuth Erast Fandorin solves baffling crime from an armchair. The other standouts include Paul Halter's "The Call of the Lorelei," an ingenious homage to John Dickson Carr's impossible crime tales; and Norizuku Rintaro's "An Urban Legend Puzzle," an outstanding representative of the "new traditionalism" Japanese movement that harks back to Ellery Queen and places a premium on skillful plotting. 

-"The Deadly Bride" edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg. Carroll & Graf 2007.
The Mystery in 2005 and 2006.  Short Stories:
   In 2006, the riches continued. Those who treasure locked rooms and impossible crimes especially welcomed two late-year volumes: Hoch's More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru), and Paul Halter's The Night of the Wolf (Wildside), translated from the French by John Pugmire and Robert Adey.      

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   For those who have been longing for the outré atmospheric stories of John Dickson Carr and others of the Golden Age who baffled readers with locked rooms and other impossible crimes     - a group which I know includes  many  CADS readers  -  it's time to celebrate.     Thanks to Wildside Press and  Bob Adey & John Pugmire, you can read 10 modern stories that evoke that period and style of story. According to Adey's foreword and the introduction by Roland Lacourbe, Halter is a Frenchman from the Alsace. His stories are historical and his two major detectives are English  -  art critic Owen Burns at the turn of the 20th Century and Dr Alan Twist, a magician who operates in the pre and post World War II era. The stories are the kindCarr would have loved  -  a werewolf killer, a homicidal snowman, coffins dancing in a hermetically sealed crypt, a victim killed at the top of a guarded tower, and the like, seemingly "impossible" to explain rationally, yet all made clear in the end by Halter's detectives. Add to that a creepy Continental atmosphere and the comparison with Carr will not seem at all out of line.    Two of the stories have appeared previously in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and, though you might solve one or two yourself, you will probably be as baffled as the storytellers are by most of these tales. 

-Publisher's Weekly October 22, 2007
*The Night of the Wolf  Paul Halter, trans. from the French by Robert Adey and John Pugmire. Wildside $12.95 trade paper
   Most of the 10 outstanding stories in this collection from French author Halter, the first English-language edition of his work, center on an impossible crime, a still potent subgenre that was once a fixture of last century's golden age of detective fiction. Halter sets up puzzles for his sleuths that appear to defy any rational explanation and then provides logical and satisfying solutions that few, if any, readers will anticipate. John Dickson Carr fans should be particularly impressed by the variations Halter plays on the no-footprint-in-the-snow-near-the-corpse premise, especially with "The Abominable Snowman," in which witnesses see a snowman come to life and stab a man to death. Readers intrigued by such situations as how bodies in a locked vault could move around or how three people could be shot to death in a sealed escalator with no one nearby, will relish these tales. One hopes that Halter's impossible crime novels will soon be made available in English as well.