Who doesn’t love a list? No-one who matters, that’s who. And since I’ve now read all twenty of the translated short stories of Paul Halter it seems inevitable that I should have my own preferences laid out for everyone to disagree with.
Right, here we go: the final two Paul Halter stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine previously unreviewed on this blog. Oh, hang on a minute, what am I going to do next Tuesday…?
With Paul Halter’s debut novel The Fourth Door (1987) being the subject of my 500th post this coming weekend, it’s time to dive into two more of his short stories from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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.
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.
Given that an overwhelming majority of modern crime writing really isn’t my thing, it’s always lovely to see Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine publish some short fiction for me to get excited about, like a new Paul Halter story or, as in the current November/December 2017 issue, something from Japanese master Soji Shimada (I’ll Westernise his name herein, since that’s what I’ve done previously).