Returning to the Devon setting which proved home to one of the best impossible crimes in fiction, The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023) finds Paul Halter once again mixing mysticism with a small town setting to varied effect. Doubtless Halter is greatly enjoying himself in detailing the first ever case for his detective Dr. Alan Twist, sprinkling more than a few references to John Dickson Carr, ne plus ultra of the impossible crime, along the way, but the book still disappointed me: the eventual shape and the answers it provides to its somewhat amorphous mysteries ensuring a fun time if not a memorable one. Halter’s done far worse, but he’s also done much, much better.

Cast here as a relatively youthful investigator of paranormal phenomena, Dr. Alan Twist is invited to the village of Moretonbury by lord of the manor Jason Malleson, who has been hearing ghostly footsteps in the night, and claims to have chased a spectre into a long-locked room from which it unaccountably vanished. Upon arrival, Twist meets the newly-promoted Inspector Archibald Hurst, who has been sent down by his superiors to investigate the local legend of a siren, whose shriek rings out across the village and has signalled death for the men who didn’t hear it on several occasions down the years.

“Look at you, barely arrived, with two unexplained mysteries in hand, and now you have another one…”

The first false note for me is in this structuring, where nothing has been said to Twist about the mystery of the siren’s call despite it directly impacting on Malleson’s life: it is the male heirs in his wife’s family who have been killed down the years, either throwing themselves to their death or falling from a decrepit tower on the estate while fighting with a wingèd creature. The idea that these two sets of events might be unrelated is unthinkable, and yet Twist and Hurst are brought in separately…nah, I don’t believe it.

Of course, half the fun of Halter’s writing is that it often seems unbelievable, and the way he folds in so many different additional puzzles — a shipwreck, not one but two cases of disputed identity — is to be applauded. I feel that the best of Halter’s work hinges on ideas which are more concrete than the general haze of happenstance and suspicion deployed herein — the homicidal genie of The Tiger’s Head (1991, tr. 2013), the impossible stabbing of The Lord of Misrule (1994, tr. 2006) — but then he’s done great work with the nebulous likes of The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999, tr. 2018) and the exceptional The Madman’s Room (1990, tr. 2017), so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make this work.

And yet, I couldn’t really tell you what the plot was, and if questioned at any point during the book I wouldn’t be able to tell you what had really happened. Some deaths occur, but in such a way that they’re not really all that impossible, and the presence of a Scotland Yard man seems less and less likely as the skein progresses without any real reason for him being there. Lots of suspicion is aired, some people are interviewed to no particular end, and a bunch of Carrian touches stirred in — most notably the none-more-Gideon-Fell lexicographer Jeremy Bell, plus subtle nods to the likes of The Crooked Hinge (1938) and The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) — but it all feels rather intangible, not so much a plot as a series of events that have to be detailed because Halter wants to tell you why they all happened together in the final few chapters.

And yet…he knows he’s not writing great literature (c.f. the character reading a locked room mystery “[whose] plot was so far fetched that he almost burst out laughing several times” and the late lament that one character is “obviously trying to complicate something that is complicated enough, [so] why stop there?”) and it’s fun watching the patterns fall out, with a good surprise murderer from an impressively-drawn and tight cast. And while none of the inexplicabilities — I shy at calling them full on impossibilities, perhaps ‘implausibilities’ is better — really wow you with their setup or explanations, there’s still a streak of genius in the mind that can construct this shape from these impressions. Oh, and the explanation for the second siren-related death is ingenious, even if the other cases raise at least one more question than they answer.

All told, then, The Siren’s Call is the sort of cracked diamond that comes from ebullient enthusiasm rather than measured consideration, and Halter’s enthusiasm is always fun to witness. But, for me, a little more consideration was needed to bring this up to the standard I’d expect from Halter — when you’ve shown the level of innovation and construction he has in this most challenging of subgenres, your second-tier work is always going to suffer by comparison. I had fun with this, and continue to appreciate the efforts John Pugmire goes to in bringing these books to English readers, but this one’s not going to live long in my memory.

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See also

TomCat @ Beneath the Stains of Time: [A]s it stands, The Siren’s Call ended up being a tale of two detective stories: the detective story it could have been and the detective story we got. Regrettably, the detective story we got is not the classic it could have been.

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