Author: paulhalter

Characters dressed in the garb of 17th century plague doctors roaming alleyways haunted by Jack the Ripper…A plague victim vanishing off a stretcher under the noses of witnesses a few feet away…The corpse of the same victim reappearing under the nose of a police officer half a mile away. How are such things possible in the London of 1938?Are the events connected to a conversation overheard … overheard between a celebrated writer of mystery plays and his principal actor, where each accepts a challenge to commit a murder and pin it on the other? What is the connection to a…

A famous actor is sent to his death from a high window; eye witnesses say he was pushed by an invisible hand, thus mimicking another murder committed in the same house more than fifty years earlier. Three local girls have also died in similar inexplicable fashion, propelled from the top of Wish Tor, a rocky outcrop. Is there an invisible creature roaming the sinister and forbidding landscape of … of Dartmoor? Or is there a human agency behind the murders and, if so, how is it done? The renowned criminologist Dr. Twist and the irascible Inspector Hurst of Scotland Yard…

We are in Victorian London, with its gaslight and fog, not long after the Jack the Ripper Murders. A mysterious cloaked figure wearing a hideous, leprous mask and sleigh-bells is stalking the countryside outside the capital, committing murder wherever it goes, yet leaving no footprints. This is the first Paul Halter novel featuring amateur detective and aesthete Owen Burns, who regards the … impossible crime as an art form. The Lord of Misrule was the first book to be published by what was to become Locked Room International. It is being republished so that the cover layout is consistent with…