THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF

by Nicholas Fuller

This short story collection (Wildfire, 2006) is the first translation of any of French detective writer Paul Halter's books into English. (Courtesy of Robert Adey and John Pugmire, whose excellent article on Halter can be found here: http://www.mysteryfile.com/Halter/Locked_Rooms.html .) More translations are promised, so hopefully it won't be long before Anglophone readers can enjoy his best books: Le Diable de Dartmoor , in which an invisible man seduces and murders village girls; L'Image trouble , with its double narrative alternating between past and present; and his masterpiece, La Septième hypothèse , his masterpiece, about a murderous duel between an actor and a playwright.

Halter is a very uneven writer, and for every one of his novels that I admire and enjoy, there is one that I loathe. A short story collection like this, which showcases both his strengths and his weaknesses, is therefore the perfect introduction to his work.

Although he has often been proclaimed as the heir to John Dickson Carr, his impossible crimes are often disappointing. He has a brilliant knack for thinking up situations – a keeper burnt to death in an inaccessible lighthouse in the middle of a storm, a maharajah assassinated in his palace behind three locked doors – but the solutions are often disappointing. They lack the sheer simplicity of Carr or Chesterton, and, like Talbot and Rawson's books, often feel like elaborate but ultimately banal tricks (fiddling with locks and bits of string – neither exciting nor particularly fair). A 139 pas de la mort , for instance, has a memorable locked room – years-old corpse unearthed and installed in his favourite armchair, without the perpetrator leaving a single footprint in the layers of dust that cover the floor – but the method is disappointing, and the event itself almost entirely irrelevant. Just as disappointing is “The Dead Don't Dance at Night” (in this collection). The situation (coffins flung about a sealed vault) echoes Carr's Burning Court and Sleeping Sphinx , but the solution doesn't live up to it, because it doesn't feel properly integrated. Others rely on chance or on the victims doing the psychologically impossible; consider, for instance, Les Sept miracles du crime , in which one of the victims dies of thirst through sheer willpower, refusing to touch the glass of water in front of him.

In many cases, the murderer is far more memorable than the method. Le Cri de la sirène , for instance, has a pretty mediocre impossible crime (villain dresses up as banshee, appears at window, and so frightens victim so much that he walks backwards off the edge of a tower), but a separate criminal scheme of Chestertonian horror – a cross between “The Perishing of the Pendragons” and Carr's Crooked Hinge .

As a novelist, Halter is very problematic. His characterisation is often mediocre, yet in his later books, he spends more time describing the suspects' romances and quarrels than on the crime and detection, which makes several of them heavy-going. His worldview is very bleak and cynical, but, coupled with inferior characterisation, means that endings which are meant to be dark and powerful often fail dismally. He is very fond of epilogues in which characters innocent of murder are revealed to be guilty of some other crime, and receive their comeuppance; this works well in La Quatrième porte and La Mort derrière les rideaux , but Le Diable de Dartmoor , great though it is, is let down by its nasty epilogue, in which the detective, Dr. Twist, almost arbitrarily decides that a perfectly likeable man needs to be taught a lesson, and humiliates him in front of the village. In this collection, both the title story, with elements of Carr's Burning Court , and “The Golden Ghost”, or Dickens's Christmas Carol gone sour, fall into this category. The latter nearly pulls it off – although, since the miser victim repents, the reader doesn't feel that he deserves his fate, and probably has more sympathy for him than the author intended. The superior counterpart to the tale is “The Match Girl”, about the death of a miser at Christmas, but is much more satisfying, because the solution is artistically right.

SERIOUS SPOILERS: CHRISTIE'S ENDLESS NIGHT , SEVERAL OF HALTER'S NOVELS

Above all, Halter suffers from the malady he diagnoses in one story as “Ripperomania”: an unhealthy obsession with Jack the Ripper and his crimes. This is invariably combined with an equal obsession with Agatha Christie's Endless Night , in which the roguish if likeable protagonist turns out to be a cold-blooded psychopath. This device recurs with depressing frequency in his novels. All but four of his first five novels are variations on it, and, although it recurs more recently, reaches its absolute nadir in the depressing Lettre qui tue .

In fact, Halter sometimes seems to have a grudge against his protagonists. Even when the heroes are not murderers, they are reincarnations of murderers, fall in love with murderesses, or are killed themselves. Take Le Tigre borgne (2004), which I read only last week, and so is fresh in my memory. The murderer's identity is a clever surprise, and, if Halter had ended the book there, it would have been one of his very best. Instead, the murderer, once identified, kills himself and the heroine. The hero, now heartbroken, takes passage from India on a ship that catches fire and sinks. A minor villain then impersonates him and forces a character we've hardly met, and don't care about, to commit suicide. Because we're not involved with the characters, who are little more than stick figures wholly subservient to the plot, this comes across as gratuitous – and, therefore, as bad art .

And yet, for all this, Halter's detective plots are often excellent. He is at his best when writing the pure detective story, with its double-sided clues, multiple solutions, unbreakable alibis and surprise villains. One thinks not only of his best books like La Septième hypothèse, Le Diable du Dartmoor and L'Image trouble , mentioned above, but also of La Quatrième porte, La Mort derrière les rideaux , La Tête du tigre (despite one of his favourite themes), and Le Roi du désordre . This is one of the strengths of the short story. Because of its length, it is almost entirely plot, and so must rely on a strong mystery and a clever solution. Fortunately nearly all of the stories in this collection have both. In the first story, “The Abominable Snowman”, dressed as a soldier, clubs a man to death with a rifle butt, and has an elaborately ingenious plot. “The Call of the Lorelei”, which, like Halter's first novel, La Malèdiction de Barberousse , relies on Alsatian hatred of Germany , has a murder method of almost Chestertonian simplicity. “The Tunnel of Death” seems like Halter's homage to Simenon, with a professional policeman soaking up the atmosphere of an extremely long escalator where a man was shot dead (impossibly, of course). On the other hand, “The Cleaver”, about a premonition of murder, feels pre -Golden-Age, and, with its American Wild West setting, recalls Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner or Edward Hoch's Ben Snow. Finally, “Murder in Cognac ” echoes Carr's He Who Whispers , with its impossible murder on top of a French tower, and has an extremely clever twist on an old method.

All in all, a collection which whets the reader's appetite, while showcasing both the considerable strengths (original impossible situations, plotting ingenuity, clueing) and weaknesses (mediocre characterisation, bleak and cynical worldview, occasional lapses into banality) of Paul Halter.