The Night Of The Wolf [Paperback]

Paul Halter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 2007

Collected here are ten superb tales by today's master of the seemingly impossible crime, the Frenchman Paul Halter. Coffins dancing in a hermetically sealed crypt, a tunnel that murders people, a werewolf killer who leaves no trace on the snow, a victim killed by an invisible hand at the top of a guarded tower, a homicidal snowman that kills in front of witnesses... There cannot be a rational explanation for these and other hideous crimes; and yet there is. Each story is a glittering example of the brilliant plotting and atmosphere of foreboding that characterized the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Wildside Press (January 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809562596
• ISBN-13: 978-0809562596
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,212,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Macabre and Miraculous, January 21, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night Of The Wolf (Paperback)

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 that somehow comes to life. It's the sort of Western tale that Karl May used to write in the World War I period, tales of Old Shatterhand. Here it's old Ben, and the little town is called "String."

THE FLOWER GIRL combines the Christmas elements of THE GOLDEN GHOST with its twisted plot that opposes a Scroogelike miser to the "innocence" of a child, with the strict detective elements Halter is best known for. You will never guess the ending, and I leave it to you to decide whether or not it is believable in any way; Halter sets up wonderful situations (this one involves Santa, his sleigh and reindeer, and whether or not Santa could kill an evil man if provoked) and provides solutions remarkable in their simplicity and radical style. After the heights of THE CLEAVER and THE FLOWER GIRL, the remaining three stories seem pedestrian, and RIPPERMANIA in particular is this Dario Argento ripoff that Halter should never even have tried writing, it's beneath him.

Halter is said to have written dozens of novels too in which his genius flourishes in full form. Someone quick, bring them to us in English! In the meantime congratulations to Wildside Press for issuing this adventurous volume, and to the translators Robert Adey and John Pugmire for making Halter's sometimes "haltering" style sound halfway like real speech. My chapeau is off to them all.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Impossible? No, not really, January 20, 2007

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C. Styrmer (Denmark) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night Of The Wolf (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars eerie atmosphere of John Dickson Carr comes back, September 3, 2007

By 

svchw (VA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Of The Wolf (Paperback)

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...