The novel in question is the latest in the series dedicated to the second of Paul Halter's characters: in fact it was published in 2020. The strange thing is that the novel was first published in US by Locked Room International in August 2020, and then only secondly in France in December 2020.
The complete series consists of 8 novels:
1 - Le Roi du désordre (1994)
2 - Les 7 merveilles du crime (1997)
3 - Les 12 crimes d'Hercule (2001)
4 - La Ruelle fantôme (2005)
5 - The Chambre d'Horus (2007)
6 - Le Masque du Vampire (2014)
7 - La Montre en or (2019)
8 - Le Mystère de la Dame Blanche (2020)
Just as Alan Twist is assisted by Archibald Hurst, Inspector of Scotland Yard, so here the couple is more Holmesian, more classic: detective Owen Burns and his assistant friend Achilles Stock.
When Paul invented Owen Burns, he borrowed the physiognomy and appearance of Oscar Wilde, the English dandy. In fact, on his French site, Paul introduces his character like this:
Calqué sur le brillant et immortel Oscar Wilde, le dandy détective Owen Burns cultive l’excentricité avec un soin jaloux. Il passe son temps à épater la galerie, irrite à profusion et provoque à plaisir. Critique d’art de son état, il met ses exceptionnelles facultés de déduction au service de Scotland Yard, mais il ne s’occupe que d’affaires hors du commun. Son seul souci étant la recherche du Beau, il exige des adversaires à la hauteur de son talent. Digne successeur de Thomas De Quincey, il professe que le crime parfait est une œuvre d’art, et son auteur, un artiste. Empreintes de mythologie, ses aventures baignent souvent dans une atmosphère fantastique.
After an introduction, which talks about those figures to which the meaning of bringing misfortune or even death is traditionally linked, and which serves to prepare the reader for the nightmarish atmosphere in which he will live, immersing himself in reading the book, here the first scene.
WARNING : SPOILERS
It is September 13, 1924, and we are on a train and in the compartment, two women and a man sit. The man and a woman form a couple: they are John Peel and his wife Margot Richards, and then there is another. After a silence in which they study each other, the two women begin to talk: the first to speak is Margot, who reveals to the other the reason why they took that train from Paddington to Buckworth: her sister Ann called her to help her , as there is a difficult atmosphere in the family: their father Matthew Richards, a widower, has decided to remarry and has done so with his attractive secretary, hired a few weeks earlier, Vivian Marsh. Seventy years old for him, thirty for her, a forty year difference seems to mean nothing to them. But for the other heirs yes. For this reason, Ann and Peter Corsham, her husband, called her to join forces. This is what she tells the other traveller, in addition to personal vicissitudes linked to the presumed death of her husband and a new union that seemed ready to give happy results, when John Peel, presumed dead, reappeared after years of presumed death. And so Margot had to welcome back her husband, who however lacked a lot of memory and memories of her.
The other traveler instead tells a story immersed in black Africa, of a suitcase full of riches, which her deceased African husband carried with him before being killed. And the traveler brings a suitcase with her. Will it be that one? No, because she reveals to the stunned Margor that everything she told her is just bullshit, and that she, herself, is the Vivian Marsh who ensnared old Matthew.
One surprise after another.
The story moves and frames three boys in a forest: Harry, Bill and Jack. They are deciding how to profit from the poached prey that poachers capture with traps and whose skin they sell, when amidst general disbelief they see a ghostly figure advancing, white, dressed in a shroud, The White Lady. That she is said to have visited the village other times in the past, and that she brings death. Harry, who is the boldest and most braggart of the three, has chewed some hemlock leaves, not caring about the advice of the other two, and feels unwell; but when the lady approaches and touches him on the forehead, he falls dead. The boys escape and ask for help, spreading the myth of the return of the White Lady, who was previously seen at the Richards manor, by Peter Corsham, near the fountain.
In the village there is also a fortune teller and a medium, Lethia Seagrave, who in the village has a reputation as a witch or almost and who lives with a dog, three cats, a rabbit, and a crow, and who knows Matthew Richards very well who it is used for chart consultations. However, some insinuate that she also had carnal relations with the old Richards, as did the young Vivian. She in turn is consulted by Peter Corsham on the White Lady.
The apparitions of the ghostly figure continue unabated at the manor: if at first they seem harmless, then they later instill fear. So much so that at a certain point Owen Burns becomes interested, arriving with his trusty Stock and begins to investigate.
About what?
First of all on the last apparition, which took place at the castle, in the face of which all those present would be excluded from having any role in the affair, and which ended with nothing. But after Matthew and Viviana go to bed, her apparition reappears in the bedroom, but Vivian keeps her at bay by holding the candlestick that she holds in front of Matthew's face as if to defend him. Subsequently, Matthew collapses out of fear, from which he is saved. But it doesn't last long, because some time later, one evening after dinner, after Matthew has gone out for his usual walk in the garden, his absence goes on too long that a distraught Vivian goes out slamming the door violently and after a while he comes back announcing that he found Matthew dead... of fear. The only strange thing: Burns finds a strange powder in the dead man's hair.
From here the investigation branches out and involves everyone present, even the housekeeper Esther. Burns, making use of the help of Inspector Lewis of Scotland Yard and that of Superintendent Wedekind, after also reading Rchards' will, which leaves half the estate to his wife Vivian, and to his daughters, Burns:
he discovers a diabolical conspiracy involving two unsuspecting subjects, linked by homicidal passion;
he explains the apparitions and how a subject could be in two different places at the same time, during the apparition in the castle;
he also explains that the person who killed Harry was another person, who besides the two impersonated The White Lady;
and explains how Matthew was killed not by fear itself, but by those who took advantage of the critical condition of the elderly landowner, to make him die by causing him to collapse from fear, using two different guns, and how the shooting of one of the two, although it was not loud, it was not heard.
It also explains what the disappearance of a book from Matthew Richards' bedside table has to do with it, what a crow's feather has to do with it, and whether one of the sons of Samuel Ziegler, Richards' former partner who was then kicked out by him, could have slipped under a fictitious identity to take revenge on the seventy-year-old Richards responsible for the death of his father, the suicide of his mother, and the ruin of his two children. And what does an inn in central London with the evocative name The Peacock Feathers (Carter Dickson is the reference) have to do with the deal?
The novel was a surprise, a very positive one. It is Paul's most recent novel which testifies beyond all perspective that the French author, despite his sixty-eight-odd years, and the 45 novels written, and despite the fact that he says he is at the end of his career, is extremely lucid and capable to create complex and fascinating plots. Here there is no Locked Room tout court and not even an impossible murder, as long as a shot that cannot be heard is not considered such, and not because a silencer is used, but a problem of dislocation. It is a problem included in the list of impossible situations. From John Dickson Carr (The Black Spectacles) to Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat), from Pierre Siniac (Bilocation) to Noel Vindry (Le double alibi), from Anthony Boucher (Nine Times Nine) to Helen McCloy (Through a Glass , Darkly!), from Paul Halter (La quatrième porte) to Christianna Brand (Death of Jezebel), all the elite of impossible detective literature, tried with different but appreciable results. Halter tries again, as in his past, and achieves an excellent result: here, the dislocation is not entrusted to gullibility, but is a well-implemented expedient in cahoots with an unsuspecting accomplice (then in what follows we will understand why of this collaboration).
Beyond the problem, the novel is a riot of situations that fascinate and sometimes disorientate the reader: from the return of the heir, to the double White Lady played by two different people who are not complicit with each other, from the hidden union between two lovers (as adulterous) to the strange one between two people so different in age (real between Vivian/Matthew, presumed between Matthew/Leitha who then surprises with its developments), from the existent/non-existent shot to Harry's death so close to that of Agatha's Arlena Christie, up to the recurring presence of boys in Halter's novels (e.g. see La malediction de Barberousse).
And what's more, the atmosphere, one of Halter's most characteristic stylistic traits, is at his best here.
The culprits are difficult to identify as they hide under different roles: nominally they are framed in a certain way, but in reality they are in a different way. They conceive a diabolical plan, but they don't understand that someone has anticipated them and just as he escapes their attempt to blame him, so he uses his charisma to make them discover by providing the police with the right elements at the right moment. While Lewis is too direct to notice, Owens ultimately puts this person against the wall while recognizing that his deductions are not supported by evidence but only by intuitions, albeit correct ones.
In short, a magnificent novel, to be enjoyed.
Pietro De Palma
