The Seven Wonders of Crime

I knew going in that this might be a problematic read for me. I am always wary with Halter, but I try to ignore the ludicrous dialogue and cardboard characters in the hopes that this modern author of impossible crime mysteries in the classic style will play nice with his miracles (The Demon of Dartmoor, The Madman’s Room) and won’t jump the shark (The Invisible Circle, The Vampire Tree) or go all meta-fictional on me (The Picture from the Past, The Fourth Door).So, like I said, I was wary. Even huge fans of Halter had warned that Seven Wonders wasn’t Halter at his best. Still, I had hope: I had recently discovered while reading The Phantom Passage that I preferred the Victorian sleuthing team of Owen Burns and Achilles Stock to Halter’s 30’s detective Dr. Alan Twist, so I thought: what the hell?What the hell indeed?The London police are confronted with a serial killer who is patterning his – or her – crimes after the Seven Wonders of the World. As Burns remarks again and again – and again – these aren’t just ordinary murders! They are works of art, each of them an impossible crime: a man is burned alive in a secluded lighthouse with no access in or out; the victim of an arrow could not have been shot by anyone in his vicinity; a woman is crushed to death by a falling flower pot (purportedly representing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!) that nobody was present to push. There are crimes without footprints, and crimes in locked rooms, and . . . you get the picture. The killer is running through the “greatest hits” of Golden Age impossible crime situations as if he – well, as if he had devoured John Dickson Carr books. The fiend prefaces each event by sending a painting with a message to Scotland Yard, and the cops turn to Owen Burns for inspiration. Burns sees through these messages in a snap and just as quickly establishes the pattern for the crimes. Now it’s up to Burns and Stock to stop this maniac before an insane – or is it? - plot reaches fruition.Here’s the thing - and I cannot say this about any other Halter novel that I’ve read, no matter how infuriated I sometimes get with the guy: I found this one really boring. Seven impossible crimes in one hundred and eighty pages suggests a mystery jam-packed with action and, well, mystery! But it doesn’t work out that way. As miracle after miracle occurs and painting after painting arrives at the Yard, I found myself becoming restless and devoid of curiosity or wonder, like kids at a movie filled with too many special effects. (Remember when we went “Oooohhh” as the spaceship landed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?) And, despite holding off any revelations about the manner of the killings until a massive info dump at the end, Halter all too quickly allows Burns to find connections between the victims and to narrow down the canvas to four suspects contained in one household, rendering much of the text mere filler between each murder.So, with seven impossible crimes to deal with, how does Halter do here? Some of them are quite clever, and some are ludicrous. But nothing matches the sense of the ridiculous when Burns finally confronts the killer and puts together the rambling mess of a motivation for these crimes . . . well, all I can say is that I was sorry I had ordered this on my Kindle and thus couldn’t throw the damn thing across the room.I have to admit I’m disappointed. I wanted perversely to love this one and thus confound my blogging friends who have come to expect me to dump on Halter. I’m not sure there is any rhyme or reason to which titles are released to LRI for translation and publication. I can only imagine that John Pugmire would jump at the chance to release a book under the auspices of Locked Room International that contained seven locked room puzzles. I don’t care if the next selection has one teeny tiny impossible crime; I only just want it to be good!

My favorite mystery is "Rim of the Pit" by Hake Talbot. It contains a number of puzzles: a locked room murder, a ghost materializes at a seance, a murderer appears to be able to fly, plus others. Piled on top of each other, Talbot still managed to make his tale, not quite believable, but plausible. Paul Halter writes impossible crime stories, and this one just seems like overkill. Seven impossible murders occur, and while police are baffled, Owen Burns, amateur sleuth, does manage to unravel the clues and in the end explain how each of the crimes was committed. But Owen is not a particularly engaging character, and another major player, a young woman, is constantly referred to as an incredible beauty, which gets old. Not a complete failure, but it was making my head ache near the end.

Once again, thanks to John Pugmire's translation, a spectacularly-clever whodunit, from the inventive imagination of Paul Halter, is finally available to English readers. I can't think of any other author, even at the height of the Golden Age of Detection, who set himself the hurdles Halter sets for himself here, and clears.It's hard enough to come up with one seemingly-impossible murder, but Halter has seven of them here, as a murderer whose motives could not be more obscure challenges the police. The killer sends them paintings with cryptic messages announcing future crimes, and pulls them off. They include a lighthouse keeper somehow burned to death on top of his lighthouse, without any way for the killer to have escaped, given the violent storm raging, and a man dead of dehydration, although he is free to move, and has a carafe of water within reach.As with The Lord of Misrule and The Fourth Door, the book is fast-moving and atmospheric. Even readers who suspect the culprit will be hard-pressed to figure out how the murders were pulled off.If you enjoy matching wits with an author, this is for you. If this is your first Halter book, it won't be your last, and fans of intelligent crime fiction, carefully-plotted, will have a hard time waiting for Pugmire's translation of The Demon of Dartmoor-which features a killer who is literally invisible!

Having read reviews, the plot sounded intruiging and I do not frequently read murder-mystery novels.The book itself was quite enjoyable (yet somehow not quite as gripping as I might have hoped) .I found myself becoming more and more interested in seeing how it all ended and crucially how the murders were committed .......and unfortunately that did leave me feeling somewhat flat.The explanations for some of the killings were rather far-fetched and unconvincing . Yes of course the whole premise could be described as far- fetched but I would still have liked to have been knocked sideways by the explanations .That is just my opinion anyway .I am taking stock as to whether I try another of Halter's novels .

Apparently impossible crimes: check.Despicable, snobbish, and dilettante problem-solver: check.Predictable ending: check.Wonder over the crimes, and disappointment with the solutions: check.Through with Paul Halter: Almost, maybe one more push and ....Now I realise what happened to those know-all detectives and their beloved locked-room mysteries. They were so clever that they discovered some suitably outrageous dimension and went there, leaving this one for the lesser mortals!