The Night of the Wolf - Paul Halter

After some thinking during the weekend, I came to the conclusion that it becomes rather cumbersome to keep a chronological order of all the stories included in my huge project, especially since the project isn't finished and I cannot say if any earlier stories will be added.

So, instead it might be easier to go through the different story collections and anthologies I've used to gather all these stories. A blogger is allowed to change his mind, no?

So instead we'll begin with Paul Halter's collection "The Night of the Wolf" - so far the only one in English by this author. Halter is frequently hailed as the modern equivalent of John Dickson Carr, the impossible mystery master.

Halter likes to pile impossibilities upon impossibilities in his stories, but his style of writing can sometimes feel a bit dry. If that is due to the translations or because he writes that way in French as well I cannot really say, as I've only read the translations. However, I'd hazard a guess that it's a mixture of both.

"The Night of the Wolf" is a collection of 10 short stories by Halter. The French edition of the same title contains an additional story, and in the English one, two stories have been added.

The collection begins with "The Abominable Snowman" which is a very clever story of the "murder in snow" variation. It is also one of the two stories added to the English edition. The chief suspect witnesses the victim struggling with what looks like a snowman, whereafter he runs to try to aid the victim. However, he finds there is nothing he can do, and after an exchange of words with the victim's brother-in-law he runs to fetch the police. When they return they find that only the suspect's footprints are visible next to the victim...

I really enjoyed this story. The explanation is fairly plausible, and the detective of the story, Irving Farrell - who returns in a later story - is an engaging character. The setup is very elaborate, and one has to wonder whether the victim really would have trusted the killer the way he had to in order for the plan to work. Halter adds a touch of the supernatural at the end, but that bit has more or less no bearing on the main case, so it's really a bit unnecessary. Still, it is kind of effective...

Next is "The Dead Dance at Night". Another winner with a premise that Carr used in "The Sleeping Sphinx" and "The Burning Court" - a number of coffins inside a tomb turn out to have moved during the night even though no one had opportunity to be inside that very tomb at that time. Then there follows a suspicious death...

This story features Halter's main detective dr Alan Twist, a fairly obvious homage to Carr's Gideon Fell. The way the story is set up - Twist is out travelling in the English countryside in his car and has a breakdown - has been used by Halter in numerous stories by now. One wonders if he doesn't have another trick in his bag...?

However, the solution is very good. It also differs from both those offered by Carr in his novels, and thus offers a good surprise to the reader. The overarching plot is perhaps somewhat hard to take - why on earth go through all that rigmarole in order to kill someone, especially since it wasn't certain at all that death would be the result of it all? - but the clever explanation of the impossibility remedies that.

"The Call of the Lorelei" is yet another good story featuring Alan Twist. A young man contends that he has heard the famous siren calling to him several times, and one night after leaving his engagement party he is found dead in a frozen pond after having walked some distance from his intended way home.

Again, Halter stretches credulity somewhat by the explanation to why the young man heard the siren's call. Still, the murder motive in this story is more plausible than most which gives the story a boost. And the explanation for why the victim was found in the pond instead of going straight home really works.

The second story added to the English edition is "The Golden Ghost", which is a story of the supernatural, and unfortunately not very good at all. The less said the better. It's rather unfortunate that this story was added - there are several other Halter short stories that could have been added instead.

Moving on to "The Tunnel of Death", which revolves around an impossible murder on an escalator. A man is challenged to ride on the escalator where two deaths have already occurred. He travels with family, guards and police. Of course he is murdered on the escalator and yet none of the witnesses are able to see how it was done.

This was the first story of Halter's I ever read (in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) and I remember being a bit surprised at how similar Halter's impossibilities are to Carr's. I couldn't imagine a "modern" writer being so "classical" in his writing as Halter was. The main thing here is the setting and the set-up. I'm still not as sure about the solution, though. I think the police would have to be fairly stupid not to understand how the murder was committed at the time.

At this point I realise that Halter has a thing that returns in most of his stories - there is often a background history (the siren's call in "Call of the Lorelei", the challenge of the "killing escalator" in "Tunnel of Death", the centuries old orgy in "The Dead Dance at Night" and so on) that are fairly unrelated to the main story, but is used by the killer in order to stage his impossible murders.

Halter's second main detective Owen Burns features in the following story, "The Cleaver". This story is set in the mid 1800s. A man has a nightmare of a friend being killed by a meat cleaver, and when the lawmen investigate, it turns out that the friend is indeed dead, and the scene of the crime looks exactly as the man described it in his dream...

Burns is an acquired taste. I'm not overly fond of his type of character - self-aggrandizing, self-important and with a huge ego (cf. Carr's Patrick Butler). But the story itself is good. The explanation of the murder is another variation of the setup I just discussed - taking advantage of some background story in order to kill.

I don't really see this as an impossible murder, though. Or rather, in the end the impossibility is never explained. Which is a bit of a disappointment, of course. Still, the rest of the story makes up for that.

Owen Burns returns in "The Flower Girl" which is another lovely story. A variation of Dickens's "A Christmas Tale", the story revolves around a Scrooge-like character who is murdered at winter after having seen Father Christmas and a mysterious flying sleigh.

I'll have to admit that the story felt a little bit too convoluted when I read it the first time, but upon re-reading it, I think it just clicked better with me. The explanation really worked for me, and I think Halter gets in some of his better story ideas here.

"Rippermania" is the second clunker of the collection. There's no impossibility here, and the story is very derivative. It's a riff on an idea used by several other authors. Perhaps "The Hands of Mr Ottermole" by Thomas Burke was the first? We've also seen it in one Jonathan Creek episode.

"Murder in Cognac" is better and longer. It features a reclusive writer who has taken to hide in a guarded tower because he has been receiving threats. And yet, of course he is found murdered by poison.

Halter pokes a little bit of fun on some of France's better known mystery critics by naming his characters after them (well, the names are thinly veiled). He also manages to craft a good impossible mystery, which is only let down that it's fairly obvious who will turn out to be the killer - the curse of having too few characters in a story. Otherwise, the explanation works well and feels satisfying.

The final story is "The Night of the Wolf", wherein a certain Mr. Wolf has been violently murdered in his house with not a single footprint seen in the snow outside the building. The explanation (which is proposed by our old acquaintance Irving Farrell) is elegant and workable.

The main drawback of the story is the beginning and the end, which really are not needed at all. They just add a supernatural slant to the whole thing which feels rather unnecessary. So, the story itself is good, but let down a bit by these extraneous bits.

Conclusion

For my project, I've decided to add all stories except the two stories I found boring - "Rippermania" and "The Golden Ghost". It can be argued that "The Cleaver" should not be added to a collection of impossible stories, since the impossibility is never explained, but that's just a quibble. I like it enough to include it...

Fellow blogger Brad discusses this collection here: https://ahsweetmysteryblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/going-through-paul-halters-shorts/

Impossibilities of the 1800s

In my last post I promised to go through the selected short stories for this impossible project of mine (pun intended). I intend to do so in a roughly chronological order according to when the stories were written. However, bear in mind that this project is still ongoing which means that there may be later additions from a time period that I've already gone through. Obviously I'll have to do those separately at a later date.

We'll start here with the stories from the 1800s. It's fair to say that these stories are generally only tangentially mysteries in the sense that I outlined in the previous post. There is certainly some fair play here and there, but the main reason for including these stories is their historical importance - not so much their actual content.

Edgar Allan Poe and Dupin

We'll start here, with the acknowledged creator of the mystery genre. This is of course clearly debatable, since different elements of mystery had already been present in several other, earlier works. But arguably Poe was the first author to add in a ratiocinator who bears the entire responsibility of solving the mystery.

Poe is represented by two stories, both obvious choices. The first is "The Murders on the Rue Morgue". Generally seen as the first locked room mystery story, this too is somewhat debatable. If you've lived under a rock your entire lifetime and thus never read this oft-anthologised story, here's a short description of the setting: A mother and daughter are find in their locked apartment, brutally and violently murdered. Our detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and his unnamed friend AKA our narrator begin investigating the murder. A chief clue of the case is that several people of different backgrounds heard the murderer speak, yet none of them understood what he was saying, even though between them they spoke almost every language in the world.

Okay, don't search for the title of the story in Google's Image search. This was probably the only image that didn't spoil the solution

Okay, the solution here is ludicrous and stupid. ("Ook", agrees the Discworld librarian.) The explanation of the language clue only works if you don't actually think it through - how on earth can any rational person mistake **** for language X/Y/Z? Apart from that there's a fair paucity of clues - there is a discussion about the murderer's strength and so on. It is also quite obvious that this was written by an author of Gothic horror stories - I'd hazard a guess that Poe actually never had in mind to write a plausible story, rather it was supposed to be another of his shock stories - contrasting the normalcy of Paris and Dupin with the final solution.

Anyway, it needs to be included, of course. But only recommended for its historical value.

The next Poe contribution is "The Purloined Letter". This is rather more like it, and by "it" I mean a modern 20th century mystery. Here, we find none of the Gothic trappings of the previous story. This is a mundane story set in the real world - a well known man has stolen a letter which contains compromising information and is proposing to use it for blackmail. He has hidden it somewhere and the police cannot find it, even though they conduct a thorough search of his residence.

Yeah, most images spoil the solution here too...

The basic premise that the culprit uses when hiding the letter has some basis in fact. Still, come on. Of course the police would have found it, if this were reality. It beggars belief that any search would not find the letter. Sure, a cursory glance would miss it, but in the story it's stressed how thoroughly the police have searched the rooms. No, unfortunately the solution is a bit of a letdown here as well - though it's nowhere near as bad as "Rue Morgue" and a definite step in the right direction.

At this point, I'll almost immediately abandon my chronological setup and add in the Michael Harrison story "The Facts in the Case of the Missing Diplomat". There is some method in my madness, though, since this is simply a pastiche of Poe's Dupin stories. Some 120 years had passed between the writing of these stories, and when Harrison wrote "Diplomat" the impossible mystery genre had been in full swing for many, many years and had been developed by several brilliant authors (to be discussed later here on this blog). So, did Harrison make use of that?

Yes, he rather did, I think. In his story, a diplomat disappears from a yard by stepping out through a gate onto a street. When his aide comes running after just a couple of seconds later, the man is nowhere to be seen on the street, and a search cannot reveal where he is. 

When reading Harrison's pastiches, one immediately notices the humour. Dupin is developed into a more realistic character here and we get to follow his investigations more closely than in the Poe stories where it seems Dupin just presents the solution for the narrator and the reader without any of us having any chance to understand the how and what. I guess we have those 120 years to thank for that. 

So, what about the solution then? It's rather clever and probably would work fairly well in reality. It's also fairly clued - perhaps it gets a bit obvious towards the middle when Dupin asks his questions. But then again, Dupin had already seen the solution by then, so why shouldn't we? This story is recommended to locked room aficionados.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Let's get this out of the way. Reading Sherlock Holmes stories is great. Reading them as mysteries is... not great. The main takeaway from them is the characters themselves, the way they interact, the setting of the late 19th century with gaslights, London fog, horse-driven carriages and so on. As mysteries, some of the stories are good, some are even great, and some are definitely disposable.

Doyle has three impossible stories to his name. We'll begin with the ubiquitous one - "The Speckled Band". A young lady visits Holmes, telling him how her sister died in a locked room at night with no apparent explanation. And now she has to occupy the same room...

I've seen here and there that Doyle described this as his favourite Holmes story. It's certainly one of the most famous ones, no doubt about that. But on the whole, this is just about as ludicrous as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". The solution would definitely not pass muster in a more modern impossible crime story. However, I don't really think that Doyle had any specific plans to actually create an impossible mystery - it was just another way to baffle the reader and Watson.

It's been anthologised everywhere, and if you haven't read it, you should. But don't expect any true fireworks.

There is a second Holmes story by Doyle which contains an impossible mystery. That story is "Thor Bridge", and compared with "The Speckled Band", this is a pretty darn good impossibility. A woman has been killed, shot on a garden bridge, and her husband employs Sherlock Holmes to investigate the killing and to try to clear the governess who is the main suspect.

The revelation is fairly clued, and the solution works - though there is a bit too much of the Victorian wrining of hands and "female emotions", even though the story was written in the 1920s. On the whole Doyle wrote a winner here. 

It's certainly possible that by the time he wrote this story, he'd been influenced by some of the early practitioners in the impossible genre (I'm thinking mainly of Jacques Futrelle and G. K. Chesterton here), because there is some care to make the story a realistic one.

Apart from his two Sherlock Holmes impossibilities, Doyle also wrote "The Lost Special". This is one of the subgenre "train mysteries" - a subgenre I enjoy a lot. A train leaves the station, but never arrives at its destination. Everyone searches the tracks the whole way between the last place it was seen and where it was due to appear, but no one find any traces of the train.

Some tie this story in to the Holmes oeuvre by the fact that Doyle uses a "well-known detective" as a character in the story. Be that as it may, the solution - revealed through a letter from the dying culprit - is somewhat hard to believe. Well, perhaps not the solution in itself, I guess that works pretty well. But again, just like in "The Purloined Letter" it's hard to imagine that the search for the train would actually miss finding it. 

Still, it's a pretty clever story and well worth reading.

There are quite a few other stories in the impossible genre featuring Sherlock Holmes, but they are all written by other authors. I'll come to them later on, when we reach them chronologically.

In the next post, we'll move into the early 1900s. And if you think there are stories missing, there's probably a reason for that. Either that I don't like them or that I missed them. You never know...

Wherein the blogger pontificates

Let's get this show on the road then.

What is this blog about?

Well, to begin with my main focus will be on mystery short stories of the impossible kind.

However, to see whether this is something you'd be interested in, let's first engage in some definition making.

Oh, come on. Definitions are fun!

 
In the scope of this blog, what is a "mystery"?

I want to immediately make clear that my definition of "mystery" here on the blog will be more limited than what is perhaps featured under this heading in your local bookstore (or, as this is the 21st century, on Amazon).

In Swedish - my native language - we have the wonderful word "pusseldeckare". It is a compound of two words:

• pussel - literally "jigsaw puzzle"
• deckare - short form of "detektiv", which perhaps obviously means "detective," and in turn is a short form of "detektivhistoria"/"detektivroman"/"detektivberättelse", all of which is best translated as "detective story".

The salient bit here I think is "pussel", which indicates that this is a story which will challenge the reader to match his wits with the detective (and thus, the author). As we all know, in several mystery stories the protagonist uses the imagery of jigsaw puzzles and puzzle pieces as a metaphor for solving the mystery. I think that Swedish, by using this word, makes a very clear distinction of what the reader can expect from a story.

Hmm... I wonder where that final piece should go.

Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, English has no term for this type of fiction that is wholly appropriate. The usual epithet used is "Golden Age Mysteries", but I think that description is somewhat misleading (and also fairly cumbersome to write, though English has a penchant for abbreviations so I guess that isn't a huge problem).

It is misleading for two reasons:
First, I think it's hard to exactly pinpoint what the "Golden Age" actually is. No two people are agreed on where it starts and where it ends. It usually ends with people saying "Oh, you know it's kinda from the end of WW1 to the late 40s". And then a third person shows up and disagrees...

More importantly it is misleading because even if we could pinpoint the start and end of this Golden Age, you would not find any year within this so called Golden Age where all mysteries are of this particular type - fair play, clues strewn everywhere, you know what I mean.

I mean, Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest" and Kenneth Fearing's "The Big Clock" could all arguably be called Golden Age Mysteries. But I think the dissimilarities between these novels are bigger than their similarities, and really, what's the point with a term that becomes so fuzzy?

Are you confused yet?

One could also use "Golden Age Style Mystery" as a catch-all phrase. This has the advantage that it could include authors from the 19th century as well as writers in the late 20th century (or for that matter the 21st century). However, that term is even more cumbersome and still somewhat imprecise since it really doesn't define what that Golden Age Style actually is!

Definition of "mystery"

Therefore, I propose to use the term "mystery" here as applied only to fair play mysteries. This means that we will exclude thrillers, adventure stories, spy novels, and more importantly modern style stories about crime and/or serial killer stories. Personally, I'd rather apply a term like "criminous stories" as the umbrella term and reserve "mystery" to stories that actually feature mysteries - solvable ones! If you have any opinions on this, do please let me know.

The upside of this definition is also that I don't have to continuously argue for the inclusion of authors who wrote their material in a time period that was clearly before or after the Golden Age. It defines a style, not a time period.

Excellent! So what's all this about short fiction then?

One of my main projects at the moment is to create some kind of concordance of worthy impossible mystery short stories in Swedish. In order to do that, I have scanned a fairly large amount of stories from Swedish anthologies and short story collections that I own.  That resulted in maybe 75-100 stories.

The next part is to translate those stories that I only have in the English language and that I feel should be included in this large collection. This includes reading several collections and anthologies and trying to evaluate whether each story is interesting enough to be included or not. If I am of the opinion that a short story should be included, well, then there's only the small matter of translating them all into Swedish...

If only... if only

However, it was a big help that in a previous folly^H^H^Hproject of mine, I'd already scanned and translated all stories by authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and Edmund Crispin (and a handful of stories by Edward D. Hoch as well, though unfortunately far from all his impossible crime output). That meant that I could concentrate on all other authors. Not the hugest delimitation, but in a project such as this you take what you get, right?

This is where I am at the moment in this project. I've translated around 100 stories by now, and have around 100 left to translate. If you're quick at counting you've already noticed that that will be around 300 stories.

So which stories have I included? And why those particular stories? Well, that's what this blog will reveal in coming posts. Knowing me, there will probably be posts about other "mysterious" stuff. However, I'm not a particularly great reviewer. I know what I like, but I'm not particularly good at putting in words why. So bear that caveat in mind when you return here.