Spiral (Rageot Thriller) (French) Paperback – 7 Mar 2012

Before I get on to my review of this book, I need to make two apologies. First, I apologize to French readers for writing this review in English and not their native language. I used on-line translation tools to mostly translate this book, and then I used hard work and my knowledge of my own native language to get the rest. Unfortunately, while I can use my sense of English to find out what's wrong with a translation courtesy of a computer, I don't know French well enough to see what is wrong when that same computer tries to translate my English into French. I felt that it would be best to write in my native English, and from there it will be easier for francophones to decipher what I wrote. The second apology is to my fellow English-speakers---both native English speakers and those who have learned English as a second language but not French. If you want to read this book, you'll have to do what I did. This may make you angry, particularly if you are fans of "locked room" mysteries. Keep in mind that your anger should not be directed towards Rageot Thriller or author Paul Halter, but rather to English-language publishers who refuse to believe that there is a market for mysteries like these. This includes specialist mystery book publishers who won't pay the rights to an English-language translation simply because Paul Halter (who is only three years older than my cousin) is still alive. The less said of them, the better.Paul Halter is known by French mystery readers as a master of the "locked room" ("chambre closes" in French) or impossible crime mysteries. This is the type of story where a body is found in a room locked from the inside, and it seems impossible for the murderer to have committed the crime and escaped. They aren't just "whodunits" but "HOWdunits." In English, these type of stories were made famous by John Dickson Carr and later on by Edward D. Hoch. Halter has written over 30 of these books over the years since the 1980's. Although he is French, most of Halter's books are set in the same time period that Carr's and Agatha Christie's most famous books were written, England in the 1930's. (Ironically, Carr was not British but American. However, he was married to an Englishwoman and lived in England for nearly 20 years before returning to his native country in 1948.) "Spiral" is a departure from Halter in that it is set in contemporary France and the protagonists are teenagers. I would be able to say this more authoritatively if I have read (or was able to without the language barrier) most of Paul Halter's other works, but I think this may be one of his better novels.The plot concerns Melanie Riviere, the girlfriend of Quentin Leroux, a promising gymnast. On the first day of summer vacation, Melanie tells Quentin some really bad news. Instead of taking sailing lessons during the summer, poor Melanie will have to stay with her creepy uncle Jerry in an abandoned hotel off the Breton coast. To say she's not looking forward to the change would be an understatement. When she stayed with him the last time as a young girl, she was forced to sleep in the top of a tower which is reached by a spiral staircase. This reminded Melanie of a scene in the 1959 Disney cartoon "Sleeping Beauty" which always scared her. (I should note that Paul Halter is old enough to have seen the original film when it was first shown in French cinemas in the early 60's.) On top of this, a murder was once committed in the tower and it is rumored to be haunted. If that were not enough, there's a strangler loose in the area who has killed three young women.Quentin thinks there is nothing to worry about and that her imagination is getting the best of her. He tells her to call him up as soon as she gets there. Guess what? There's no cel phone reception at the hotel, and her uncle's phone hardly works at all! So Melanie is forced to write letters telling Quentin what is happening. Her letters are anything but boring. She tells about seeing a strange figure run into the tower and then mysteriously vanish into thin air afterwards, as well as seeing the ghost of the hotel face to face. Later on, a bunch of mysterious guests show up who seem to have fallen out of an Agatha Christie novel. They've come to the hotel to hold a seance in the tower to contact the ghost who will tell them who the Brittany strangler really is. A medium is locked in the tower and the only door is sealed. Guess what happens when the seals are broken and the locked door is broken open? It isn't long after this that Quentin stops receiving letters from Melanie.I know that some mystery fans will dismiss this book simply because it is written for young adults. But how many times have mystery fans read through a book that it takes a real effort to get through? A book where you have to mentally promise yourself that once you get to the last chapter and the mystery is finally revealed, the effort to read the book will finally be worth the trouble. While there was quite a bit of effort exerted in translating the book, this wasn't very hard to read after the translation was made. The chapters are short, and Halter frequently ends many of them in cliffhangers that make you want to read just a little bit more. I don't know what the correct idiom is in French, but in English, this book would be a "page turner." Fans of Halter who have read his other books translated into English might recall the dizzying plot twists that occur in the first few chapters of "The Seventh Hypothesis." There are more of those plot twists in this book, and they occur all the way through to the end. That's part of the reason why I kept my synopsis of the plot extremely brief---I didn't want to give away too many spoilers.As for the locked-room mystery itself, the solution is ingenious. Generally, the solutions to locked-room puzzles can be divided into two categories---"swinging from a chandelier" or "hiding behind a door." The "chandelier" solution is complicated, hard to visualize, and frequently relies on some gadget or gizmo. The "door" solution is simple and relies more upon trickery or misdirection. I'm happy to say that most of the solutions I've seen from Halter are in the latter category, and this is no exception. I was genuinely afraid that the key to this solution would rely on something that I had mistranslated. But somebody reading my translation (bad as it is) would see it's actually very simple and ingenious. In my opinion, the solution to this mystery is actually better than "The Demon of Dartmoor" which has been acclaimed as the best Halter novel to be translated into English. The solution is also fair. You might not guess the solution, but all the clues the reader needs to solve the puzzler are available and in plain sight.I really dislike the myopia that dictates that while most best-selling books in English be translated for the rest of the world, very little of the rest of the world's literature is worth translating into English. I think that the belief that Americans are too dumb or uninterested in reading any mysteries that are like puzzles and require effort to solve is shortsighted and dumb. This belief that has led to the entire works of Ellery Queen---once America's rival to Agatha Christie---to go out of print. (Queen's books have been revived in e-book format by Mysterious Press and Open Road Media.) When I was younger, the stories of Robert Arthur (creator of the "Three Investigators" mysteries and ghostwriter for many of the Alfred Hitchcock short story anthologies) not only got me interested in mysteries in general, but also an appetite for impossible crimes that Ed Hoch's stories would only whet. This book could do the same for a new generation of "locked room" mystery fans in the United States if an American publisher were to give it a chance. Until that happens, there is definitely a very good reason for mystery fans to learn French.