Paul Halter

Paul Halter (born 19 June 1956 in Haguenau, Bas-Rhin) is a writer of crime fiction known for his locked room mysteries.

Halter 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. He gave up life insurance for a job in the state-owned telecommunications company, where he works in what is now known as France Télécom. Halter has been compared with the late John Dickson Carr, generally considered the 20th century master of the locked room genre. Throughout his nearly thirty novels his genre has been almost entirely impossible crimes, and as a critic has said "Although strongly influenced by Carr and Christie, his style is his own and he can stand comparison with anyone for the originality of his plots and puzzles and his atmospheric writing."

His first published novel, La Quatrieme Porte ("The Fourth Door") was published in 1988 and won the Prix de Cognac, given for detective literature. The following year, his novel Le Brouillard Rouge (Red Mist) won "one of the highest accolades in French mystery literature", the Prix du Roman d'Aventures. He has published more than thirty novels. Several of his short stories have been translated into English; by June 2010 six had appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; ten were collected and published by Wildside Press as The Night of the Wolf.

Bibliography

Novels

Dr. Twist and Chief Inspector Hurst novels:

• La Quatrieme Porte (The Fourth Door) 1987
• La Mort Vous Invite (Death Invites You) 1988
• La Mort Derrière les Rideaux (Death Behind the Curtains) 1989
• La Chambre du Fou (The Madman's Room) 1990
• La Tete du Tigre (The Tiger's Head) 1991
• La Septieme Hypothese (The Seventh Hypothesis) 1991
• Le Diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor) 1993
• A 139 Pas de la Mort (139 Steps from Death) 1994
• La Malediction de Barberousse (The Curse of Barbarossa) 1995
• L'Image Trouble (The Blurred Image) 1995
• L'Arbre aux Doigts Tordus (The Tree with Twisted Branches) 1996
• Le Cri de la Sirene (The Siren's Shriek) 1998
• Meutre dans un Manoir Anglais (Murder in an English Manor) 1998
• L'Homme Qui Aimait les Nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds) 1999
• L'Allumette Sanglante (The Bloody Match) 2001
• Le Toile de Penelope (Penelope's Web) 2001
• Les Larmes de Sibyl (Sibyl's Tears) 2005
• Les Meurtres de la Salamandre (The Salamander Murders) 2009
• La Corde d'Argent (The Silver Thread) 2010
• Le Voyageur du Passe (The Traveler from the Past) 2012
• La Tombe Indienne (The Indian Tomb) 2013

Owen Burns and Achilles Stock novels:

• Le Roi du Desordre (The Lord of Misrule) 1994
• Les Sept Merveilles du Crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime) 1997
• Les Douze Crimes de Hercules (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules) 2001
• La Ruelle Fantome (The Phantom Passage) 2005
• La Chambre d'Horus (The Chamber of Horus) 2007
• Le Masque du Vampire (The Mask of the Vampire) 2014

Other novels:

• Le Brouillard Rouge (The Crimson Fog) 1988
• La Lettre Qui Tue (The Deadly Letter) 1992
• Le Cercle Invisible (The Invisible Circle) 1996
• Le Crime de Dedale (The Crime of Daedalus) 1997
• Le Geant de Pierre (The Stone Giant) 1998
• Le Mystere de l'Allee des Anges (The Mystery of Angels' Lane) 1999
• Le Chemin de la Lumiere (The Path of Light) 2000
• Les Fleurs de Satan (Satan's Flowers) 2002
• Le Tigre Borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger) 2004
• Lunes Assassines (Killers' Moon) 2006
• La Nuit du Minotaure (The Night of the Minotaur) 2008
• Le Testament de Silas Lydecker (The Will of Silas Lydecker) 2009
• Spiral 2012

Short story collections:

• La Nuit du Loup (The Night of the Wolf) 2000
• La Balle de Nausicaa (Nausicaa's Ball) 2011