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A man dies of thirst in an isolated shed with a full carafe of water beside him. Another is stabbed in a pergola surrounded by a sea of mud, but there are no other footprints. People are dying at an alarming rate, people with no apparent connection to one another save for a cryptic painting sent to the police before each murder. That, and the fact that each crime appears to have been impossible to execute. The paintings have a common theme: each contains a coded reference to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Enter Owen Burns, Edwardian dilettante and amateur sleuth, whose assistance is often sought by Scotland Yard to solve baffling crimes. Burns regards murder as an art form and is dazzled by the creativity of the mysterious killer, whose motive and methods are more baffling with each new murder. ‘The Seven Wonders of Crime’ is the second Burns novel to be published in English on Amazon, following ‘The Lord of Misrule’ in 2010. The author, best-selling French writer Paul Halter, is widely regarded as the successor to John Dickson Carr. His prize-winning novel ‘The Fourth Door, featuring his other series detective Dr. Twist, was published on Amazon earlier in 2011. In all, Paul Halter has written over 30 novels, almost all ‘locked room,’ or impossible crime. In 2006 his collection of short stories ‘The Night of the Wolf’ appeared, to critical acclaim. A fourth full-length novel, ‘The Demon of Dartmoor,’ is in preparation. Please contact: pugmire1@yahoo.com
- Sales Rank: #1027145 in Books
- Published on: 2011-12-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .41" w x 6.00" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 180 pages
About the Author
Paul Halter was born in Hagenau, Alsace, in 1956. He pursued technical studies in his youth before joining the French Marines in the hope of seeing the world. Disappointed with the lack of travel, he left the military and, for a while, sold life insurance while augmenting his income playing the guitar in the local dance orchestra. Upon discovering the writings of John Dickson Carr, he gave up the guitar for the pen. He has since written over 30 novels, almost all ‘locked room,’ including ‘The Lord of Misrule’ and ‘The Fourth Door’ – which won the coveted Prix du Roman Policier in 1987– also available in English on Amazon. In 2006 his collection of short stories ‘The Night of the Wolf’ appeared, to critical acclaim.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Murder has no language barrier
By Patrick
(This review is an adaptation of the one that appeared on my blog, "At the Scene of the Crime", on December 24th, 2011.)
Paul Halter's 1997 novel "The Seven Wonders of Crime" has now been published in English, thanks to the relentless efforts of translator John Pugmire. It is the second Owen Burns novel to be translated after "The Lord of Misrule" and the third Halter published in English, hot on the heels of his award-winning The Fourth Door.
"The Seven Wonders of Crime" is centered on a fascinating idea. Owen Burns and Achilles Stock are back in action as a serial killer begins to terrorize the nation. The faceless madman is killing people in apparently impossible ways and all the while patterning his murders on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It's an impressive to-do list and the killer is making his job harder by sending taunting messages to the police, not by handwriting his message or pasting it with various letters from newspapers, but by painting his messages onto canvas!!! (Naturally, I use "he" to describe the killer for the sake of convenience. Don't take the pronoun as a clue.)
This attracts the attention of Owen Burns, aesthete extraordinaire who loves the concept of beauty and tries to discover the artistic soul behind these murders. For if you consider murder as a fine art, this killer is creating masterpieces! Seven impossible crimes, and the messages sent to the police in advance contain coded clues...
But perhaps it's a bit misleading to speak of all the crimes as impossibilities. The fifth murder never struck me as impossible, and the impossibility involved in the last murder is not the murder itself. Nevertheless, these are some really creative scenarios. Let's take the first murder for instance: that of a lighthouse keeper as a storm is raging outside, cutting him off from the world. Suddenly, a scream sounds in the night: the keeper has burst into flames and is screaming for someone to come and help him. Nobody can come to his aid because access to the lighthouse is impossible. At the first possible moment, police officers go to the lighthouse, where they discover that someone locked the poor man in from the outside, thus eliminating the possibilities of a bizarre suicide or equally-bizarre accident.
Another example of Halter's creativity in these scenarios can be found in the fourth murder: a certain Major Rhodes is found in his house dead. The house is conveniently surrounded by some earth which proves that nobody left or entered the house. The cause is dehydration, and yet... there is a carafe full of water right by the corpse!!!
I won't give away the scenarios behind the other murders. These are extremely creative and readers ought to discover them for themselves. Part of this book's greatest delight is wondering what the next impossibility will be, and just how the killer will be able to fit in the reference to another Wonder. Some of these solutions are top-notch... others are not. I found three of them top-notch and only one a major disappointment. Unfortunately, the major disappointment is the book's most intriguing set-up: the major's death as a result of dehydration. The other solutions are flawed but they do have points of interest.
As for the killer's motive, we've seen it done before, but it's presented in an intriguing way here, with an odd mix between lunacy and rationality. You can certainly tell why Owen Burns was attracted to the case! However, I was not a huge fan of the way the crimes were explained, divided into seven "lessons" where Owen Burns and one of the characters discuss the crimes. Here, the killer's identity suddenly becomes obvious, even before the first murder is explained. To this point, there weren't too many clues pointing to the killer (although the clueing is technically fair), but this format gives the game away pages before it should. The ending, which could have been haunting, loses much of its potential because of this.
Owen Burns is my favourite of Halter's series characters. He's the most original and interesting, with a personality inspired by Oscar Wilde. This book gains a lot from his presence. If it were solved by anyone else, I don't think I'd enjoy this book as much. Burns is obsessed with the idea of art and tries to find it in these crimes. He does a pretty good job, and Halter seems to enjoy writing his character.
The Seven Wonders of Crime is a tough book to translate, and I give translator John Pugmire full marks here. The killer's cryptic paintings contain cleverly-worded clues that don't always translate well into English. John Pugmire does a wonderful job of keeping the clues intact while tinkering with the language to make it compatible with English. For instance, in the French edition of the novel, the murdered lighthouse keeper is named Alexandre Riley. In the English translation, he's renamed Adrian Maxwell. This small change ensures that the clue in the first note doesn't get lost in translation. Overall, I liked the Kindle edition. It's well-formatted and proof-read. As with any book, there are a few mistakes, but these aren't distracting. If you don't want to spend $20 on the book, the Kindle edition provides an excellent alternative.
Overall, The Seven Wonders of Crime is a fascinating read. It's not quite perfect, failing to deliver on the impossible crime that intrigued me the most. But it is an excellent read and, in my opinion, an improvement on the first book in the Owen Burns series. The plot is fast-paced and fairly-clued and the set-up is marvellously intriguing. It's an incredible journey through the fascinating imagination of Paul Halter, and I'd recommend it to aficionados of the impossible crime.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
(Way) too much of a good thing.
By Ron
My favorite mystery is "Rim of the Pit" by Hake Talbot. It contains a number of puzzles: a locked room murder, a ghost materializes at a seance, a murderer appears to be able to fly, plus others. Piled on top of each other, Talbot still managed to make his tale, not quite believable, but plausible. Paul Halter writes impossible crime stories, and this one just seems like overkill. Seven impossible murders occur, and while police are baffled, Owen Burns, amateur sleuth, does manage to unravel the clues and in the end explain how each of the crimes was committed. But Owen is not a particularly engaging character, and another major player, a young woman, is constantly referred to as an incredible beauty, which gets old. Not a complete failure, but it was making my head ache near the end.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Seven Impossible Crimes For The Price Of One
By Leonard I. Picker
Once again, thanks to John Pugmire's translation, a spectacularly-clever whodunit, from the inventive imagination of Paul Halter, is finally available to English readers. I can't think of any other author, even at the height of the Golden Age of Detection, who set himself the hurdles Halter sets for himself here, and clears.
It's hard enough to come up with one seemingly-impossible murder, but Halter has seven of them here, as a murderer whose motives could not be more obscure challenges the police. The killer sends them paintings with cryptic messages announcing future crimes, and pulls them off. They include a lighthouse keeper somehow burned to death on top of his lighthouse, without any way for the killer to have escaped, given the violent storm raging, and a man dead of dehydration, although he is free to move, and has a carafe of water within reach.
As with The Lord of Misrule and The Fourth Door, the book is fast-moving and atmospheric. Even readers who suspect the culprit will be hard-pressed to figure out how the murders were pulled off.
If you enjoy matching wits with an author, this is for you. If this is your first Halter book, it won't be your last, and fans of intelligent crime fiction, carefully-plotted, will have a hard time waiting for Pugmire's translation of The Demon of Dartmoor-which features a killer who is literally invisible!
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