Locked Room International

#547: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The Hiding Place’, a.k.a. ‘As If by Magic’ (1961) and ‘The Invisible Poison’ (1961) by Julian Symons

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Locked Room Murders

Another month of me taking advantage of the wonderful resource that is the British Library to investigate stories from Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders (1992) — and we begin with an author I was very eager to read further after recently encountering him for the first time: Mr. Julian Symons.

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#500: Making an Entrance to Remember via The Fourth Door (1987) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 1999]

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Fourth Door, The

I am reliably informed by the product page on Amazon that I purchased the Kindle edition of The Fourth Door (1987, tr. 1999) — the first Paul Halter novel I ever read — on 19th May 2013.  After nearly 6 years, 14 novels, 19 short stories, and 30 blog posts that included a celebration of his 60th birthday I’m going back to the beginning to see where it all began.

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#469: The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2018]

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Man Who Loved Clouds, Thestar filledstar filledstar filledstarsstars
The last time anyone tried to use the wind as a threatening murder weapon we got The Happening (2008) from the, er, mind of M. Night Shyamalan.  Nine years prior, however, Paul Halter had written about the small coastal village of Pickering in 1936, and the youthful, ethereal Stella Deverell predicting the deaths of locals ahead of the storms and winds that batter the vicinity.  And what Stella predicts comes to pass: not just deaths, but madness, relationships breaking down, and unforeseeable good fortune for fishermen.  Add in her own talents in making gold from rocks and vanishing without a trace and you’ve got an impossible crime tale on your hands…

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