The Night of the Wolf

I am just half way through this amazing collection of short stories, and can't wait to express my gratitude to this Frenchman. The book is full of ingenious impossible crimes immersed in the John Disckson Carr-ish eerie, Gothic atmosphere. Paul Halter's book is a must-read if you love JDC's work. The only regret is that there are still so many novels by this amazing author out there, only in French! I do hope there will be a wise publisher to have all Halter's masterpieces of murder mysteries translated...

THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF is the English language debut of French genre novelist Paul Halter, who has been acclaimed here and abroad as the present-day successor to the grand detective master John Dickson Carr (1906-1977). Dickson Carr was well known for his eccentric detectives and his penchant for impossible crimes (locked room mysteries, no footprints, tricky alibis) all told in true Golden Age style with plenty of chills and atmosphere. Pennsylvania born, Carr had a bad case of Anglophobia, and his best known detectives were British; England formed the mise-en-scene for nearly all his best novels (in a few instances, effective scenes were laid elsewhere, like the French sequences in HE WHO WHISPERS). The books he laid in the USA are pretty dim. Paul Halter must have an England thing going, or else an overly developed sense of the homage, and this is what makes the stories in THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF, even the crumby ones, so charming. His period sense is always picturesque, even when anachronisms pop up threatening to shipwreck the narrative. His detectives, the magician Alan Twist and the 90s aesthete Owen Burns, are effective cariciatures. What makes him great? His spooky conceits and then the storytelling power that blows them out into the world of obsession and puzzle. This book is recommended not only to fans of Golden Age detection, but to all of you interested in wonderful writing. The opening story, THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, is one of the best, and readers will not soon forget the image of a snowman in a cul-de-sac, draped in a soldier's kit and rifle, who attacks a stranger passing by on the street, leaving him for dead then resuming his quiet snowman ways. THE DEAD DANCE AT NIGHT brings us to an underground crypt, locked of course, in which the heavy coffins have been shifting about, falling out of their niches and in general acting disreputably. The explanation will surprise you, but the story itself is peopled with lifeless, dead figures. Halter's not great at characterization, and you can barely tell one straw man from another. THE CALL OF THE LORELEI has another puzzle plot, feels rushed, and the conflicts of the Alsace-Lorraine region insufficiently sketched in to provide much of a backstory to the murder story. THE GOLDEN GHOST introduces another strain in Halter's writing, the pure Dickensian, as he reinterprets Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL with a vengeful ghost plot. Here the mystery element drops out nearly completely, replaced by a haunting symbolism that hits every note it's supposed to. He is a masterful writer in some ways, nearly inert in others' a curious case, like Dickson Carr combined with Dreiser's sense of fate and evolution. THE TUNNEL OF DEATH, like Carr's FATAL DESCENT, describes a murder committed on an elevator (here an escalator--an amazingly long one) carefully watched and guarded. THE CLEAVER uses its Western American setting to beautiful effect; it's the story of a premonitory dream of a murder tha

This book is a must for fans of the impossible crime story. It contains 10 stories, most of them "locked rooms". I had heard a lot about Paul Halter before reading this collection, and I wasn`t disappointed. The style is "golden age", due to Mr. Halter's admiration of John Dickson Carr. In my opinion, this book is a masterpiece. It has everything, from originality to interesting settings. I hope Mr. Halter's novels will be translated into english. I cannot wait.