#1092: “You will understand at the end of my story…” – The Crimson Fog (1988) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2013]

/ JJ / 12 Comments

With a new Paul Halter short story recently appearing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, not to mention novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023) being newly translated, the time seemed ripe to jump into the sole remaining Paul Halter novel that I first read pre-blog. The Crimson Fog (1988, tr. 2013) represents something of a tricky proposition to review, so let’s see how we do.

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#1091: The Bloodhounds Bay (1936) by Walter S. Masterman

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Bloodhounds Bay

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Jack Reid, posing for the last few weeks as a holidaying artist, breaks into Severinge Abbey one night with the intent of relieving its chapel of its more valuable contents, only to half-witness in the darkness the murder of Lord Henry Severinge by an unknown hand. Feigning ignorance, Reid returns to the Abbey the next day to find that the body has disappeared, and suggests that they use the bloodhounds of the Severinge’s neighbour Colonel Graham to track down the missing man. When the body is discovered in an Ellery Queenian hiding place, the small matter of who could plan such a diabolical crime, and to what end, comes into question.

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#1088: The Moving Finger (1942) by Agatha Christie

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Moving Finger

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I had intended to review Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) by Carter Dickson this week, but the opening chapters of that puzzled my will and so I’ve taken the coward’s way out and opted to reread what I remembered as a stone-cold classic: village poison pen tale The Moving Finger (1942) by Agatha Christie. My recollection was that this both made the threat of nasty letters actually seem like something to fear and provided a superb reveal of its guilty party through one of the best pieces of negative evidence in the genre…and, in these regards, it stood up. It also fell down in a couple of others, but we’ll get to that. Headline: this is a great example of what the Golden Age did so well, and comes highly recommended.

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#1085: Let X be the Murderer (1947) by Clifford Witting

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Let X be the Murderer

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The recent Bodies from the Library conference will have brought Clifford Witting to everyone’s mind, so the time seems ripe to look at Let X be the Murderer (1947), the latest Witting title to be reprinted by Galileo Publishers. When Sir Victor Warringham phones the police with a story of luminous, ghostly hands trying to strangle him in the night, Detective Inspector Charlton must contend with the various facets of Warringham’s household trying to prevent him from investigating. When murder is committed in the house, however, the denizens cannot block the investigation, despite a few keeping secrets that they’d rather not have brought to light.

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