Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

#1101: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Celestial Thief’ (2021) and ‘The Wendigo’s Spell’ (2023) [trans. John Pugmire 2021/2023]

/ JJ / 10 Comments

I’m slowly working my way up to the newly-translated Paul Halter novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023), but there’s the small matter of these two short stories to deal with first, translated by John Pugmire and drawn here from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

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#1050: Teacher Knows Best in A Gun is a Nervous Thing, a.k.a. Ride with the Executioner (1955) by Charlotte Armstrong

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Quite some time ago, I was made a very generous gift of a random selection of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and anthologies and, aside from the odd story, they’ve sat largely unread on my shelves since. Well, no more. From today, they will (probably) make regular appearances on The Invisible Event where longer or notable entries are concerned.

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#495: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘Nausicaa’s Ball’ (2004) and ‘The Robber’s Grave’ (2007) [trans. John Pugmire & Robert Adey 2008/2007]

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uncollected halter

My five-hundredth post approacheth — a reread and re-evaluation of The Fourth Door (1987), the debut novel of M. Paul Halter, of whom I am quite the fan — and so Tuesdays in February will focus on the six translated Halter stories featured in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine that have yet to be collected into a second English-language anthology.

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#383: Success, and Being a Victim Thereof in ‘The Fires of Hell’ (2016) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2016]

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EQMM May June 2018

Having recently reviewed Paul Halter’s short story collection The Night of the Wolf (2006), and having previously shared my thoughts on Soji Shimada’s ‘The Running Dead’ (1985), Szu-Yen Lin’s ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ (2004), and Halter’s own ‘The Yellow Book’ (2017) all from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the time seems perfect to look at the newest Halter translation to come our way — the short story ‘The Fires of Hell’, published in this month’s EQMM.

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#367: Old Tricks, New Dog – ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ (2004) by Szu-Yen Lin [trans. Szu-Yen Lin & John Pugmire 2014]

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EQMM Aug 2014

Following the hugely enjoyable and terrifyingly ingenious machinations of Szu-Yen Lin’s Death in the House of Rain (2006), published in English last year by Locked Room International, I was delighted to discover that another Lin story was available in English, ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ from the August 2014 edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

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