The Helm of Hades Read online

  THE HELM OF HADES

  Paul Halter books from LRI:

  The Lord of Misrule (2010)

  The Fourth Door (2011)

  The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)

  The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)

  The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)

  The Tiger’s Head (2013)

  The Crimson Fog (2013)

  The Night of the Wolf (2013)

  The Invisible Circle (2014)

  The Picture from the Past (2014)

  The Phantom Passage (2015)

  Death Invites You (2016)

  The Vampire Tree (2016)

  The Madman’s Room (2017)

  The Man Who Loved Clouds (2018)

  The Gold Watch (2019)

  Other impossible crime novels from LRI:

  The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Török) 2012

  The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014

  The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014

  The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015

  The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015

  Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015

  The Moai Island Puzzle (Alice Arisugawa) 2016

  The Howling Beast (Noel Vindry) 2016

  Death in the Dark (Stacey Bishop) 2017

  The Ginza Ghost (Keikichi Osaka) 2017

  Death in the House of Rain (Szu-Yen Lin) 2017

  The Double Alibi (Noel Vindry) 2018

  The 8 Mansion Murders (Takemaru Abiko) 2018

  The Seventh Guest (Gaston Boca) 2018

  The Flying Boat Mystery (Franco Vailati) 2019

  Bibliography

  Locked Room Murders Second Edition, Revised 2018

  Visit our website at www.mylri.com or

  www.lockedroominternational.com

  THE HELM OF HADES

  Paul Halter

  Translated by John Pugmire

  The Helm of Hades

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The 10 stories contained here were all written by Paul Halter and first appeared in French in various publications. All stories first appeared in English in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the issues shown, and are reprinted by permission of the author:

  The Gong of Doom (Le gong hanté), June, 2010; Jacob’s Ladder (L’échelle de Jacob), February, 2014; The Man with the Face of Clay (L’homme au visage d’argile), July, 2012; The Scarecrow’s Revenge (La vengeance de l’épouvantail), May, 2016; The Fires of Hell (Les feux de l’Enfer), May/June, 2018; The Wolf of Fenrir (Le loup de Fenrir), March/April 2015; Nausicaa’s Ball (La balle de Nausicaa), September/October, 2008; The Robber’s Grave (La tombe de David Jones), June, 2007; The Yellow Book (Le livre jaune), July/August, 2017; The Helm of Hades (Le casque d’Hadès), March/April 2019

  English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2019.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover design by Joseph Gérard

  For information, contact: [email protected]

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Halter, Paul

  [Le Casque d’Hadès English]

  The Helm of Hades / Paul Halter

  Translated from the French by John Pugmire

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  The Gong of Doom

  Jacob’s Ladder

  The Man with the Face of Clay

  The Scarecrow’s Revenge

  The Fires of Hell

  The Wolf of Fenrir

  Nausicaa’s Ball

  The Robber’s Grave

  The Yellow Book

  The Helm of Hades

  PREFACE

  In the fascinating The Lost Gallows (1933), one of his earliest masterpieces, John Dickson Carr’s first series detective, Henri Bencolin, head of the Paris Sûreté, made the following pronouncement: “... in brief, life lacks all the fascination, the drama, the tidy working out of plot....” It’s no secret that the principal virtue of a great writer is to establish a plot and work it out in an orderly fashion. It was one of the best qualities of that great mystery writer, and today it is the privilege granted to Paul Halter in the development of a sophisticated intrigue.

  Bencolin again, on truth being stranger than fiction: “... spare me that tedious lie! You are quoting the only paradox which unimaginative people ever succeeded in inventing... what we need is some fearless iconoclast... saying, ‘Fiction is stranger than truth.’” Here again, Carr and his disciple compete with each other to offer their readers situations stranger than the most unbridled reality.

  The faithful readers of Locked Room International can henceforth be certain: with forty novels to his credit since 1985, Paul Halter, the worthy successor to John Dickson Carr, has become, in just over thirty years, the world’s leading specialist in the impossible crime.

  Initially following in the Master’s footsteps, he has succeeded, little by little, in distancing himself and creating his own style by choosing themes, settings, and periods that the father of Gideon Fell and Henry Merrivale never had the idea or the opportunity to exploit. And so, after conforming to the classical norms of the insoluble problem, he set out in previously unexplored directions. Witness such “archeological” problems as Le Crime de Dédale (The Crime of Dedalus, 1997), Le Géant de pierre (The Stone Giant,1998) or Le Chemin de la lumière (The Path of Light, 2000); unusual works such as La Lettre qui tue (The Letter that Kills, 1992), a novel of espionage like no other, or The Picture from the Past (L’Image trouble, 1995), which follows the deconstructionist style of Bill Ballinger. He amused himself by revisiting the legend of King Arthur in The Invisible Circle (Le Cercle invisible, 1996); by constructing a novel on the theme of the disappearing street with The Phantom Passage (La Ruelle fantôme, 2005); and by renewing the myth of the painting which can drive the viewer mad with Lunes assassines (2007). He also interested himself in the strange legend of the Banshee in Le Cri de la sirène (1998); in the curse of the Egyptian tomb in La Chambre d’Horus (2007); and the evil doppelgänger in La Corde d’argent (2010). More recently, he has been inspired by the bizarre phenomena so assiduously collected by Charles Fort and has offered us detective fiction off the beaten track with Le Voyageur du passé (The Voyager from the Past, 2012) and La Tombe indienne (The Indian Tomb, 2013). All this before exploring, in his own inimitable manner, the legend of Dracula with Le Masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2015).

  And yet, this French master of contemporary detective fiction is now published in the United States, in Italy, in Japan, and even in China, before his native country!

  Luckily, the inestimable Locked Room International and its vigilant creator, John Pugmire, are there to ensure Paul Halter keeps the place he merits in the pantheon of the great mystifiers.

  ***

  Paul Halter has always claimed to be uncomfortable with the short story: a literary form which demands such conciseness that it seems impossible to simultaneously create an atmosphere, bring characters to life, construct a subtle and disconcerting plot (his trademark), and mislead the reader before unveiling the final stunning conclusion. This is your opportunity, with this new collection of tales, to test to what degree he is mistaken and to assess the range of his imagination.

  For the proof is here that, in the short story just as in the novel, Paul Halter excels at painting an atmosphere in a few strokes, describing the most surprising situation
s with a touch of irony, and introducing the Angel of the Bizarre into the most prosaic daily reality. His powers of evocation lie in the subtle accumulation of small details augmented by a touch of the macabre and a tinge of terror. Not forgetting his permanent humour, which infuses his writing with a captivating charm and helps to mystify the reader, leading him or her to a perception of events at odds with their real meaning. For our author is the master of the red herring, the false clue leading insidiously to the wrong track....

  Let us start with “Jacob’s Ladder,” which borrows from the Book of Genesis the fascinating image of a ladder standing on Earth and leading to Heaven. As you can well imagine, there is nothing biblical about our magician’s inspiration, because his heroes will be confronted by a crime surpassing human understanding: ‘in the middle of a completely isolated area, and in the presence of witnesses, a man was found whose body had been smashed as the result of a precipitous drop, as if he had fallen from the sky.’

  In the same way, another event described in the Old Testament, the Flood, will provoke the incident of which the archaeologist Sir Jeremy Cavendish will be the victim in “The Man with the Face of Clay.” Fascinated by his research into that cataclysm, described in even more ancient texts, the unfortunate scientist will apparently become the victim of the curse of Ishtar, goddess of Mesopotamia, and a creature made of clay whose face has nothing human about it.

  And, in “The Wolf of Fenrir,” it is the barbarous beliefs of Nordic mythology which come to the fore, with the monstrous wolf son of a god and the strange connection between a young woman and that hideous ghostly creature, which could commit its heinous acts without leaving any traces in the snow.

  Our world, as everyone knows, is full of mysterious phenomena which defy logic and which scientists and researchers are unable to explain.

  Premonitions, for example, and the case of an innkeeper in a small village in France capable of predicting an uninterrupted series of conflagrations in “The Fires of Hell.” How to explain rationally such a phenomenon if we exclude the possibility that the clairvoyant himself was responsible for the succession of disasters? A thorny case for the police! Just like the gong of Indian origin in “The Gong of Doom,” which sounds by itself to announce imminent death, posing the problem of an inexplicable murder and defying the most elementary laws of logic. And the case of the crime which appears to have been committed by a scarecrow (“The Scarecrow’s Revenge”) with only the footprints of the victim, skewered by a pitchfork, in the surrounding mud, a scenario rarely exploited, even by writers of the bizarre. I know of only one previous instance: the very strange “The Scarecrow Murders” (1948) by Joseph Commings.

  Sometimes, Paul Halter allows himself an excess of the unusual, as in “The Yellow Book.” Captain Marc Santerre is found stabbed to death with an obsidian knife inside a bungalow locked from the inside and surrounded by fresh virgin snow. (The minimum requirement for an impossible crime, as we all know!) But his murder was already announced by a message from beyond, received during a séance, and next to his body was a copy of the mythical Robert W. Chambers book The King in Yellow (1895) which was alleged to drive its reader mad, and which influenced a good many of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories.

  And what to think of the archaeologist Conrad Berry, who claims to have found, during his Peloponnesian excavations, the authentic “Helm of Hades,” King of the Underworld? Bludgeoned in his office, to which the sole access was a door under constant supervision by several witnesses, he succumbed to his wounds, proving that his assailant seemed to know how to use the magic powers of that object, which was alleged to render anyone who wore it invisible.

  In passing, the reader can appreciate the narrative mastery of “Nausicaa’s Ball” where, under the pretext of appealing to the Greek princess that Homer mentioned in The Odyssey, the author plunges us into a story worthy of Agatha Christie herself.

  And our author doesn’t disdain a more humble story—albeit slightly twisted by his taste for the baroque—that of “The Robber’s Grave,” inspired by a real-life situation. Hung in 1870 or thereabouts for having robbed two travellers, the Englishman John Davies protested that he was not guilty, all the way to the gallows. His last words were ‘I pray to God to prove my innocence by never allowing grass to grow on my grave.’ I’ll let you guess what happened later....

  ***

  As I wrote above, in this exceptional collection of short stories Paul Halter proves, once again, the full range of his palette and the enduring quality of his talent. His readers will find the (by now inescapable) Dr Alan Twist, a magician of sorts who solves the most complex puzzles and has never known defeat; or the brilliant art critic Owen Burns, an aesthete who carefully cultivates his eccentricity, and whose singular personality resembles that of Oscar Wilde. Two private investigators blessed with analytic faculties quite out of the ordinary, and who make it a point of honour “only to take exceptional cases, mysteries which defy comprehension or, if you prefer, crime in its most enigmatic and, therefore, its most artistic form.”

  I therefore invite you to follow in the footsteps of these two great scourges of mystery, each an amateur detective capable of finding “a rational explanation in the most improbable cases and the most mysterious crimes.” With one last word of advice to those who would follow the paths drawn by our master storyteller: beware of the formidable talent of Paul Halter and his exceptional powers of persuasion. He will put your intellect to the test, show himself capable of getting you to admit the inconceivable and the astounding, and convince you of the wildest impossibilities.

  As John Dickson Carr, high priest of the strange and unusual, once said: The Reader is Warned!

  Roland Lacourbe, Paris 2019

  M. Lacourbe is an internationally renowned expert on locked room mysteries and impossible crimes and the editor of numerous anthologies on the subject. JMP.

  THE GONG OF DOOM

  It was a normal evening in the Hades Club and the members were, as usual, enjoying the peace and quiet of their surroundings. In the great oak-panelled room the gentle hum of discreet conversation could barely be heard above the crackling of the flames in the hearth. Crossed swords hung above the imposing black marble mantelpiece on which stood a bust of the Greek god who had given his name to the club: the meeting-place of a select circle of prosperous Londoners devoted to the discussion of puzzling mysteries, criminal and otherwise. But the peace was suddenly shattered by a strange noise….

  As one, the members turned to stare reproachfully at Horace, the servant who had had the misfortune to drop a large silver tray and was frantically trying to gather up its contents.

  ‘That’s strange,’ said Superintendent Charles Cullen. The senior Scotland Yard official, a straight-backed man clearly in the prime of life despite greying hair combed carefully back, was sitting close to the fire in the company of his old friend, the eminent criminologist Dr. Alan Twist. The learned doctor, advanced in years but still sporting a splendid ginger moustache beneath a pair of gentle but shrewd eyes behind his pince-nez, had frequently helped the Yard over the course of his career.

  ‘And what a noise,’ continued Cullen. ‘It sounded just like an oriental gong. For a moment I thought I was back in India and we were being called to dinner.’

  ‘Strange? Why do you say that?’ retorted Twist. ‘Horace had just served Professor Felton his customary port but then, unfortunately, he apparently slipped on the freshly-polished floor and dropped the tray whilst he was trying to retain his balance. On hitting the floor, the tray produced a deep, resonant sound—a powerful vibration not unlike a gong, as you have correctly observed. The train of events seems perfectly logical to me, so I really don’t see what’s odd about it.’

  The policeman shrugged his shoulders:

  ‘What I meant to say was that’s not the kind of sound one hears every day, you must admit.’

  Comfortably ensconced in his armchair, Twist slowly took off his pince-nez and appeared to contemplate th
e collection of swords and daggers above the mantelpiece.

  ‘On the contrary, what would have been strange was if the tray had made no sound at all. Or if a great gong, having been struck, reverberated on its stand but remained silent.’

  ‘That’s clearly impossible,’ scoffed Cullen. ‘But, knowing you, it’s obvious that you’ve been reminded of one of your famous imbroglios: those seemingly impossible problems that you seem to attract like flies. Wait! Let me guess… It’s something to do with those weapons, I’ll bet. Perhaps that oriental dagger you’ve been staring at so intently?’

  The criminologist nodded smilingly.

  ‘You’re very observant, Charles. But in fact, it’s more like the opposite.’

  ‘The opposite?’ echoed the superintendent, frowning. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It was not about a silent gong—.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that.’

  ‘— but a gong that sounded without being struck.’

  ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘Not at all. The object in question did indeed have the reputation of sounding by itself. And in this case, it wasn’t to announce dinner but something altogether more sinister. I should really tell you the whole story, Charles, so you can appreciate why the detectives in charge of the investigation were at their wits’ end. After all, not only was there the Gong of Doom, there was also a murderer who could walk on snow without leaving a trace!’

  Charles Cullen’s reaction was to take a quick gulp of whisky and stare hard at the grim statue of Hades. After a moment of silent contemplation, he observed: