This week for Fridays Forgotten Books and in honor of Patti Abbott once
again collecting links, we have a double take for you. First Patrick and then
Barry consider THE SEVENTH HYPOTHESIS by Paul Halter. Their takes are a bit
different on the novel as you see below…..
On a night in August of 1938, police constable
Edward Watkins is walking his beat when he comes across some strange sights. It
seems that somebody is walking around the streets of London in the garb of a
seventeenth-century plague doctor. Soon afterwards, Watkins has a conversation
with an odd character calling himself Doctor Marcus, a doctor of crime.
Suspicious, the officer is convinced that the doctor has hidden a body inside a
nearby trash can—a suspicion that Doctor Marcus confirms! Watkins looks into
them and finds they are all empty, much to Marcus’ apparent surprise. So the
mad doctor skips off, but as a parting shot he tells the officer to look into
the trash cans once again just in case. When Watkins does this, he discovers to
his horror that there’s a dead body
inside after all.
But how did it get there? And where did Doctor
Marcus disappear to? All this seems like it is nonsense, but a few months
later, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst are visited by a man named
Peter Moore, secretary to Sir Gordon Miller, a prolific author of mystery
plays. According to Moore, Sir Gordon received a visitor in his study and the
two men had a verbal duel of sorts, which ended in a murder challenge. The two
men toss a coin, and the result will determine which man will commit a murder. That
man must try and pin the blame on the other, and under no circumstances are the
two players allowed to refer to the “game”. Unfortunately, Moore could not see how
the coin landed...
Before long, Peter Moore is found dead, shot during
an attempted burglary inside the home of his own employer. Dr. Twist and
Inspector Hurst hurry to the scene of the crime, and they attempt to solve this
complex mystery. Hurst instantly comes up with six hypotheses, but Dr. Twist
isn’t entirely convinced, and postulates that there must be a seventh
hypothesis to explain everything. This is the plot of Paul Halter’s La Septième Hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis), a book that has
been translated into English by John Pugmire.
The Seventh Hypothesis is quite
possibly Paul Halter’s masterpiece. This is a book with such complexity that it
leaves The Fourth Door, The One-Eyed Tiger, and The Demon of Dartmoor straggling behind
as though they were padded by extensive social commentary. There is so much
meat to this story and you’re never quite certain what on earth is going on
until the end… even if by some chance you tumble to the secret behind a trick
or two before the end. There are at least two impossibilities in this novel.
The first has an excellent and simple solution. The second is a bit more
complex and harder to guess, but I liked the solution to the first one a little
more. Just as much fun as the impossibilities are the verbal duels, which seem
like they were inspired by the verbal duels in Sleuth, with revelation after
revelation further complicating the plot despite there being only two principal
actors.
The most notable achievement is that Paul Halter
effectively gives you a mystery with only two suspects and challenges you to
guess which one has committed the crimes. You have a 50:50 chance, right? And
yet Halter manages to calculate just how your brain will work. Hmm… you say to
yourself. It seems impossible for X to have done it, so he’s got an elaborate
alibi that will get busted wide open, but if that’s the case it means Y must
have done it to frame X, but if that’s the case, it must be an elaborate
double-bluff designed to get you to think Y has done it when it was really X,
but if that’s the case… I made my
official guess near the start of the novel, but must have changed it a good
five or six times before I got to the end. This is quite simply a diabolically
ingenious detective story, a masterpiece of plotting at its finest! In fact, I
wouldn’t hesitate to call this one of the best detective stories I’ve read all
year long.
To write this review, I read both versions of the
novel. My French edition is found in an omnibus released by Le Masque, and I
bought the English translation in Kindle form. I can highly recommend both of
these editions. John Pugmire has done an excellent job of getting to the heart
of Halter’s writing style. I can’t define it in technical terms, but I
performed the only litmus test I can offer: I read one chapter of the book in
French, read the next in English, then switched back into French. All three
chapters felt like they were part of the same book: an accomplishment for which
John Pugmire must be lauded. He finds that sense of play: Halter challenges his
readers to solve the crime and then leads them on a merry chase down several garden
paths simultaneously. He doesn’t propose to give you an insight into the human
condition: this is merely another installment in what John Dickson Carr called
“the grandest game in the world”.
Overall, The
Seventh Hypothesis comes highly recommended for fans of complex
Golden-Age-style plots. This is one of Halter’s best efforts and one of Dr.
Twist’s most complex cases. It ends on a wholly satisfactory note, and the
solution is diabolically ingenious. The writing is most agreeable, with a sense
that the whole thing is a challenge to the reader: a challenge Halter won
hands-down. This is plotting at its finest, and is not to be missed under any
circumstances!
Patrick Ohl ©2013
The
nineteen-year-old Patrick Ohl writes reviews of the books he reads on his blog,
At the
Scene of the Crime. In his
spare time he plots a takeover of the world, being careful to factor everything
except for Bruce Willis into his equations.
THE SEVENTH HYPOTHESIS (1991) by Paul Halter
English translation 2012 by John Pugmire
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
I'm a huge fan of French mystery novelist Paul Halter
and have been ever since John Pugmire began translating his works into English.
Halter can devise complex plots as well as any writer from the Golden Age,
including his inspiration, the great John Dickson Carr, and is unequivocally a
genius at formulating "impossible crimes," often surpassing
acknowledged masters like the aforementioned Carr, Hake Talbot, Clayton Rawson,
and Edward D. Hoch.
Having read the short story collection The Night of the Wolf and the novels The Fourth Door, The Lord of Misrule, The
Seven Wonders of Crime, and The Demon
of Dartmoor, I approached The Seventh
Hypothesis anticipating another wild ride through the realm of the
impossible.
Its opening chapters did not disappoint. They begin on
the night of August 31, 1938.
Police constable Edward Watkins is making his rounds when he hears footsteps,
looks around, and sees the odd-looking shadow of a pedestrian. He goes after
the latter, gets a look at the actual person, and is stunned by what he sees:
"...his senses had not betrayed him and the
extraordinary image was still burned into his mind: the ankle-length coat; the
gloved hands; the wide-rimmed hat; and, instead of a face, a white mask in the
middle of which was a beak at least a foot long. Even though he had never seen
such an individual in the flesh, he had seen enough illustrations for there to
be no doubt in his mind: the man he had
seen was a plague doctor."
Still later, Watkins comes upon a formally-dressed man
looking through the contents of a dustbin. A doctor's bag is on the ground
beside him. When Watkins asks him his name, he says he's Dr.
Marcus—"Doctor of Crime." He claims to have put a body into the dustbin,
but Watkins quickly determines that it's empty. There are two other such
containers, both of which also prove to be full of everything but bodies. The
constable is pretty certain he's dealing with a mental case. As the latter
departs, he recommends that Watkins have another look in the first dustbin.
"The man was even madder than he'd
suspected," the policeman thinks. "He'd hoped to make him believe
there was now a body inside the dustbin which had been empty mere moments ago.
It was not only absurd, it was manifestly impossible. With a smile, he lifted
the lid.
"He could not believe his eyes: there really was
a corpse inside."
In pursuit of Dr. Marcus, he encounters a colleague,
Constable Harvey, to whom he explains what has happened. When Harvey goes off
in search of "reinforcements," as he puts it, Watkins continues
walking along the residential block when a window opens behind him and a
couple, Mr. and Mrs. Minden, ask if he's found their lodger, a young man named
David Cohen. Watkins, of course, has no idea what they're talking about, and
thus asks for an explanation. They add to the bizarre nature of his evening
when they explain that they run a boarding house and that Cohen had taken sick
earlier in the evening. He had evidently summoned medical assistance because
three doctors—one of whom was Dr. Marcus, who told the Mindens Cohen had the
plague—tried to carry the lodger out on a stretcher. Something happened and
Cohen bolted, literally vanishing into thin air. Watkins describes the body in the
dustbin and the Mindens say the description fits Cohen.
A few days later, Scotland Yard Inspector Archibald
Hurst relates the incidents to his friend Dr. Alan Twist, the eminent
criminologist. The two discuss them at length, each speculating about what
might have occurred and how but not getting anywhere definitive.
A few months later, a man named Peter Moore calls on
Twist and Hurst.
Moore is the
secretary and sometime chauffeur for Sir Gordon Miller, a renowned writer who
specializes in mystery scenarios. "Theater and cinema producers fell over
themselves to get each new production. His name alone was a guarantee of
success...His assessments on matters of mystery fiction carried enormous
authority, and many were the authors secretly jealous of his fertile
imagination." The story Moore relates involves Sir Gordon and Donald
Ransome, a gifted American actor who has
been in England for the past five years and who has appeared in most of Sir
Gordon's productions. He once also proved himself to be a skilled improviser
during one such production when another cast member fell ill during the
performance by "supply[ing] a completely different resolution to one of
Gordon Miller's most complex plots by extemporizing an entirely new ending. It
was a prodigious tour de force which
caused many to believe the author had found the perfect interpreter of his
plays."
The outlandish episode Moore reports, which reminds the detectives
of a fatal event in Sir Gordon Miller's past, suggests a potential link to the
crime Constable Watkins discovered. Not long after this meeting another crime
occurs, this one in Sir Gordon's home, and Hurst and Twist earnestly begin
their investigations into a case that involves a bizarre and dangerous wager
and as elaborate a cat-and-mouse game as any in mystery fiction.
There are moments in the novel that might remind some
readers of Anthony Shaffer's brilliant drama Sleuth, but they lack the kind of scintillating dialogue that
delineates Shaffer's characters in addition to advancing his plot. And therein
lies my biggest problem and greatest disappointment with The Seventh Hypothesis. I've pointed out in reviews of other Paul
Halter works that his efforts at characterization are extremely slight, that
plot is everything. Nevertheless, he usually manages to provide enough basic
information to enable the reader to differentiate one character from another.
But except for Sir Gordon's habit of rolling some steel balls around in his
hand in a manner reminiscent of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, nobody's behavior stands out in The Seventh Hypothesis. Compounding the
problem, everyone sounds alike; more
than a few times I found myself paging back through the book (not as easy in an
electronic edition as in a physical book) to identify who someone was who'd
appeared earlier because nothing about his or her speeches or comportment had
made a lasting impression. Halter is fond of the old-fashioned device of
narrative within narrative—i.e., having a character relate events that he or
she witnessed, including actions and dialogue, in a formal bookish manner
rather than in a realistic conversational style that reflects the character's
unique speech patterns and idioms. Therefore in this story, Louis Minden sounds
exactly like Peter Moore.
Readers for whom the puzzle and detection aspects of
mystery stories are paramount will not only be more forgiving than I of The Seventh Hypothesis, they'll probably
applaud it, because as always Halter does a stellar job in those areas. Those
for whom even a modicum of characterization is indispensable might share my
disappointment, impatience and, frankly, eagerness to get to the last page so
as to start reading something else. But even John Dickson Carr had his lapses,
so I look forward to reading more novels by Paul Halter—and other French
"impossible crime" writers—as John Pugmire translates them into
English. Keep 'em coming, Mr. Pugmire!
Finally, in the realm of trivial passing thoughts, let
me mention that as soon as I came upon the name Gordon Miller in the novel, it
struck me as familiar, but I couldn't recall where I'd heard it. During the
course of writing this review something clicked, and I went to the Internet
Movie Data Base to determine if my recollection was right or wrong. It turns
out I was right. In the Marx Brothers' movie "Room Service," Groucho
plays an impecunious producer named Gordon Miller who is trying to avoid
eviction from a hotel and find backing for his latest production. Did Paul
Halter know this and use the name deliberately? Or is it purely a coincidence?
Hmm, mystery writers and their detectives seldom
believe in coincidence....
Barry Ergang © 2013
