A WEIGHTY NOOSE: INTRODUCING PAUL HALTER

In French, the word haltérophile means weight-lifter – which is apt when one considers that some of the best mental exercises of modern times are offered by the Frenchman Paul Halter.

 

Halter's work is heavily inspired by that of John Dickson Carr, the great Anglo-American detective writer and master of the impossible crime – murders committed in locked rooms, inaccessible towers, and on beaches where not a single footprint was left by the murderer. Halter originally intended to use Carr's famous corpulent and crapulent lexicographer sleuth Dr Gideon Fell in his first novel, La Malédiction de Barberousse (The Curse of Barbarossa). When the Carr estate refused permission, he replaced Fell with Dr Alan Twist, an English criminologist of astounding thinness who nevertheless moves like a fat man and is capable of devouring half a dozen chops in the time it takes his policeman friend Inspector Hurst (a reworking of Sir Henry Merrivale's aide-de-camp Inspector Masters rather than Fell's comrade Superintendent Hadley) to eat one.

Like Fell, Dr Twist has a penchant for impossible crimes and the supernatural – which is fortunate, for he keeps encountering murders which can only be the work of a ghost, a demon or an ancient curse.

In his chronologically first case, Le Cri de la Sirène (The Scream of the Siren, 1998), set in the 1920s, Dr Twist goes to Cornwall to investigate a ghost which has been haunting the house of Jason Malleson (who may be an impostor), and discovers that Malleson's wife's family, the Cranstons, has been the victims of a banshee whose scream is audible to all except the doomed man. In 1905, Sir Charles Cranston, Mrs Malleson's grandfather, challenged the devil to appear and was thrown from the top of a tower by a winged creature; and his son met a similar fate. The book moves very slowly, but the leisurely pace allows Halter to draw the six suspects (including Mrs Malleson's cousin Edgar, a believably atrocious portrait of a self-pitying “sensitive” adolescent) and build up the tension before murder is committed on page 170. Edgar is attacked by a winged creature on top of an inaccessible tower, and falls to his death, while Malleson dies soon after – on the edge of a cliff, completely alone. The solutions are slightly disappointing, relying on chance and improvisation rather than on a single brilliant idea. The rest of the solution, however, is excellent. As Mike Grost said of Carr's Crooked Hinge , the solution is more complex than the mystery, which (as here) is brilliant when it isn't cluttered. Jason Malleson's crime is as dark and monstrous as Chesterton at his best (combining, perhaps, the horror of “The Sign of the Broken Sword” with the method of “The Perishing of the Pendragons”). The murderer is very well-hidden. I suspected one character because of his tent-like cloak, and another on the theory that what happened in Corinth several thousand years ago may have happened again. Neither of these was correct. Excellent stuff, although not quite up to Carr's level.

The first case in which Dr Twist appeared, though, was the privately published Malédiction de Barberousse , set in Alsace in the 1940s and with a theme of Alsatian hatred of the Germans. A young German girl is murdered on top of a tower, apparently by the ghost of Barbarossa, whose curse fell on those who insulted his memory or the town of Haguenau . The protagonist is a young man (now living in London ) who was a boy at the time of the murder, and who consults Dr Twist about the mystery after his brother sees the girl's ghost and after he himself sees her spirit while trapped in a London telephone cabinet. The book itself is rather mixed. The solution to the murder in the tower is simple and quite clever, but the truth about Barbarossa's curse is artistically very bad. The murderer's identity is effective, although, since the same gimmick is used several times in Halter's early work, the experienced reader will be able to guess the truth early on. It works well here, but it's a device that I never want to see again .

Halter's second novel, La Quatrième Porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) is the best of his early work. Mrs Darnley was stabbed to death several years before, and her ghost is reputed to haunt the house. The spiritualist Patrick Latimer is locked into the room where she died – not only locked but sealed with a unique coin in the possession of Arthur White, who never left the company of the others. When the room is broken into, the party discovers that Latimer has vanished from the room – and in his place is a dead man, believed to be White's missing son Henry, who has the gift of being in two places at the same time and who may be the reincarnation of Harry Houdini. The locked room is beautifully constructed. I spotted the impersonation as soon as the man appeared, was pleased with myself – and then Halter revealed the truth two pages later. He rejects the only logical solution that an intelligent reader will have reached at the same time. .this is one of the most important skills a detective writer can have: to know his reader's mind and manipulate him accordingly. This is amply demonstrated in the reappearance of Henry and the fascinating idea that he is Houdini bis. Inspector Drew, the policeman in charge of the case, then offers a brilliant and convincing false solution that many a writer would have been pleased to think of, only to have it founder on a cast-iron alibi. The reader then wonders whether Latimer could have pretended to be someone impersonating him – at the same time that Halter makes it first the police theory and then, in a coup de théâtre, the Latimers become the next victim. The plot has reached a point of absolute bewilderment when, in a narrative tour de force, the whole plot turns out to be the invention of the detective novelist John Carter, obviously an homage to John Dickson Carr:
“At the current moment, you are without any doubt the best. The only one who, in spite of our period where alas! mystery and marvels have given way to violence and sex, continues to write problems worthy of the name. I would even say that you are the last defender of the true detective story.”

Of course, it is also a description of the detective writer Halter wants to be. Having stepped out of the frame, Dr Twist then offers an entirely brilliant solution to the locked room, showing that the title is not entirely accurate, and then – maestria! – throws us back into the conundrum with the revelation that Carter's story is actually what happened, and that Carter was one of the protagonists. The twist in the last few lines is superbly done, and is Halter's best use of a device that appears in his first three novels.

Halter's third novel, Le Brouillard Rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988), is an odd work. It is one of his best-known and most popular novels, but it is, like Carr's Burning Court , a thoroughly unlikeable book. The first half of the story involves a series of impossible stabbings in an English village, with the culprit revealed halfway through. The second half is set in London , and throws the reader into the grisly career of Jack the Ripper. With such a subject matter, it is hardly surprising that the details are so nauseating and often gratuitous that enjoyment goes by the board. The solution is simply a third use of a device which suggests that Halter may have post-modernist leanings. All in all, a rather nasty work that reads more like Ruth Rendell than John Dickson Carr.

Halter's next book, La Mort Vous Invite (Death Invites You, although Death's Head at the Feast would be a better title; 1988), is also disappointing. The murder is full of fascinating potential. Harold Vickers, a writer of detective stories (impossible, of course) whose career is on the wane is found shot through the head in a locked room, his hands and head badly burnt, and the body seated at a table covered in food and drink, including newly-cooked chickens. A pair of gloves are at his feet, and a cup of water stands under the window. More mysteriously, the set up comes straight from the detective story he was writing, La Mort Vous Invite . The detective story was inspired by an unsolved murder that happened twenty years before; and, most striking of all, the victim's head and hands were burnt 24 hours after death. Add to this the fact that Vickers had a twin brother (living in Australia , of course) who came to the country and cannot be found, and one would think this was a superb detective story. Wrong. The plot is very easy to solve. I had strong suspicions about the way the locked room was worked, and the murderer is obvious from the very beginning. In fact, I had most of the plot worked out before Dr Twist revealed his solution. Worse, however, is Halter's violation of one of the principal rules of the detective story (particularly the impossible detective story) regarding red herrings: that nothing should be put in to make things look bizarre or more difficult. The murderer's plan here was simply to make the whole thing look as mysterious as possible, in order to confuse the police (and cast some suspicion on another character). All of those appetising clues – the dinner, the burnt features, the glass of water – were completely unnecessary!

Halter's fifth novel, La Mort Derrière les Rideaux (Death Behind the Curtains), is generally considered to be the weakest of the first five novels – which is odd, because I would place it second after Porte . The story is set in a London boarding-house, whose lodgers include an old woman, Miss Violet Garfield, who has told Chief Inspector Hurst that one of the lodgers is planning a murder, several people dotty about hair, including a blind hairdresser and an odious man who cut a woman's hair off – and a homicidal maniac who scalps his victims. Miss Garfield is stabbed to death in the doorway of the boarding-house – an impossibility, because the end of the passage was watched by two people, while only Miss Garfield's footprints were in the snow outside the house. More than that, the crime, like so many in Halter's work, is identical to one committed several decades before. The book is Halter's best pure detective story of the first five. Although Porte is a more brilliant detective story, Dr Twist hardly appears, and Hurst not at all, making it a tale of mystery and imagination rather than one of imagination. Here, however, the problem and the story are neatly combined. The reader keeps suspecting character after character and trying to work out the method used in both crimes. I suspected the right murderer and the right method, but rejected them a few pages later – which requires skill on the author's part to pull off. Dr Twist's solution is fully satisfying, and the epilogue, which reveals an entirely unsuspected crime, is the icing on the cake.

Where should one begin with Halter? My advice is to find the three Halter tomes published by Masque. The first contains all the novels from Malédiction to Rideaux . The second includes La Chambre du Fou (The Chamber of the Madman), about a room which kills its occupants and a man who can predict the future; La Septième Hypothèse , in which sixteenth century plague doctors haunt modern London; La Tête du Tigre , which combines the murder of a retired soldier by a malevolent djinn and a trunk murderer; La Lettre qui Tue , an adventure story in the tradition of Carr's Punch and Judy Murders ; and Le Diable de Dartmoor , in which people are pushed to their doom by the titular invisible demon. The third omnibus contains Le Roi du Désordre , which introduces Halter's second sleuth, the Wildean Owen Burns; À 139 Pas de la Mort , which echoes Chesterton in the seeming illogic of much of the story; L'Image Trouble , in which a murder in the present closely echoes one a century before; Le Cercle Invisible , set in a Cornish castle and invoking King Arthur; and L'Arbre aux Doigts Tordus , about a vampiric tree with more than a hint of MR James's “Ash Tree”.

Try Halter – and exercise your wits.