
I’ve hit a point with a well known mystery where I just don’t have any enthusiasm to go on. I might get back to it in a few weeks, but in the mean time, where to go? Why, Paul Halter of course. Even when they don’t completely pan out, Halter’s stories are a mad flurry of impossible crimes and brave ideas; just the kind of jolt that I need. In fact, I’ve been dabbling a bit with his short stories in between bouts of my more tepid read, and tales like Jacob’s Ladder and The Cleaver have been that perfect mix of creativity and shock that I’ve been lacking.
My next Halter was meant to be The Phantom Passage, but I decided to go all in with The Seven Wonders of Crime. Based on the reviews that I’ve read, this isn’t his best book – far from it, it would seem – but the whole set up is so out of this world that I just had to go for it: a serial killer creating a criminal masterpiece with seven impossible murders. Just do that math on that. We’ll get seven impossible setups, along with seven solutions. For a book running 180 pages, that lets us average about 12 pages between either a crime or a solution. Of course, we have to assume those solutions might get packed together into a 30 page denouement, which leaves us with 150 pages for seven crimes, which is still a pretty good run rate of 20 pages between crimes.
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