On that foggy October afternoon in 1902, London was a place where it was all too easy to become lost or disoriented. You literally couldn't see more than a few yards in any direction. To a young man named Ralph Tierney, it turned into a sort of nightmare. Unfamiliar with the city, he quickly became lost in a maze of small streets and twisting alleyways. Eventually, he found himself in a street whose sign identified it as "Kraken Street." He met some very odd people in that street who directed him to enter one of the houses. There, he had a truly terrifying experience - some kind of vision, perhaps, in which an apparent murder was committed. Horrified, he ran from the house, back out into the fog - but when he tried to retrace his steps, he found that Kraken Street had disappeared, replaced by a high (and unbroken) wall. His story was disbelieved - police insisted that there was no such place as Kraken Street, although there was talk about people who had found the street, entered it - and never came out. Fortunately, Tierney had a friend, a man named Owen Burns, who became interested and agreed to investigate. Which was a good thing, as the frightening visions seen in that house in Kraken Street did seem to be coming true.
That most peculiar disappearance of an entire street in London is at the heart of the mystery called The Phantom Passage, written by the French author Paul Halter in 2005 and now available in both paper and e-book versions in a fine translation by John Pugmire of Locked Room International. As a 21st-century book, it has marvelous restorative powers for those of us who grumble that nobody writes our kind of mysteries any more. It's also the subject of today's audio book review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Paul Halter is widely regarded as an accomplished master of the locked room/impossible crime mystery. He writes in French, of course, but I've now read several of Pugmire's translations and find they manage to preserve the very frightening atmosphere of the original stories. Halter is regarded as one of the few modern authors of impossible crime mysteries who can be compared favorably with the late John Dickson Carr, and not solely because of his puzzles. Like Carr, Halter is a master of atmosphere. Readers who join him may find themselves a century ago in foggy London town, looking nervously over their shoulders to see who may be treading softly behind them in the dark. The secret here, of course, is to convince the reader that the events described by the narrator quite clearly must have a supernatural explanation – and then to provide a logical and cohesive (all right, also generally a bit far-fetched) explanation for events.
I’m not going to say much more about The Phantom Passage, except to note that there are a number of serious crimes involved, including several murders, along with the problem of that disappearing passage named Kraken Street, and there are some wonderful tricks played on readers to keep them looking in the wrong direction for solutions. If you enjoy impossible crimes, if the prospect of a vanishing street disappearing in foggy London after showing frightening scenes of the past and of the future gives you chills, if this all suits your cravings, you can’t go wrong with Paul Halter’s The Phantom Passage.
(UPDATED with podcast link)
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