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The Night Of The Wolf

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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.

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.

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...

Paul Halter's Night of the Wolf lives up to the hype: these are exceptional tales of locked rooms and impossible crimes.
I'd been an avid John Dickson Carr fan (reader/collector) for several decades and was excited to hear praise Halter at a JDC site. I'd tracked down the headline tale in an old EQMM issue some months back, and it blew me away.
I finally tracked down this volume here on Amazon and wondered:
Would Halter's quality hold up in a 10-story collection?
Absolutely! He has crafted stories represented in this remarkable collection that are every bit as good as any I've read, including those of JDC. It's almost as if a new-found stash of hidden gems that JDC had written under a pseudonym during his peak years had been unlocked.
Halter demonstrates a masterful grasp of the genre and shows himself as a polished, efficient storyteller. He pulls you right in and keeps up the intensity and foreboding as he stays on track with little excess prose, if any.
In sum these stories offer superb plotting, solid characterization, meaningful motives, ingenious methods, and an eerie atmosphere that drips off the 150+ pages.
Another impressive aspect is that the stories are fair clued, or he at least subtly tips off the reader to the direction things are headed.
I found Halter's stories unexpectedly dark and edgy: these are seriously good, sharply written detective tales.
A high standard is set from the start by The Abominable Snowman and Halter doesn't falter throughout. I felt Murder on Cognac was the weakest of the bunch, relatively speaking anyway, partly because I guessed at the method. I had little deductive success with the other tales, which made them all the better. The Dead Dance at Night is flawless, and Call of the Lorelei is a classic.
I was caught off guard and spooked by the Golden Ghost and expect you will be, too, as it offered a twist--if not twisted--ending. The Flower Girl packs a novel's worth of plot on its pages and is as unexpected a Christmas tale as you'll find.
Cover to cover the book is exceptional, and the forward and introduction are illuminating.
The story lengths are just right, and his denouements pack a surprising punch.
These are superbly crafted mysteries of the type that I've enjoyed for some 40 years. Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Halter!
PS: May we please have more translations of his work published?!