The Crimson Fog

In this fascinating novel, one of the masters of impossible crime fiction takes on one of the greatest criminals of all time. Sticking scrupulously to the facts, Paul Halter explores the Jack the Ripper murders and offers his own theories about the identity of the monster, what drove him, and how he was able to vanish under the noses of the police during the spree of escalating horror which sent the citizens of fog-ridden London into paroxysms of fear in the autumn of 1888.

But the year before “Saucy Jacky” began his reign of terror, someone started to investigate an astonishing impossible murder committed in the country village of Blackfield nine years earlier. That, too, involved a monstrous murderer who slaughtered witnesses and vanished under the noses of his pursuers. Is there a connection with the Ripper cases which followed?

In the first part, set in 1887, an openly unreliable narrator, Sidney Miles, returns to his hometown of Blackfield in disguise to solve a murder that “no one, absolutely no one, could have committed.” The stabbing death of Richard Morstan as he was preparing a magic trick behind a curtain has spawned legends of a phantom killer. Miles’s inquiries stir the pot, and other baffling murders follow. This section sets the stage for a suspenseful and historically accurate retelling of the Whitechapel slayings that focuses on the killer’s seemingly supernatural ability to disappear after committing his butcheries. As in the best whodunits, the solution is both logical and surprising. Golden Age fans encountering Halter for the first time will want to seek out his other, equally artful puzzles.’Paul Halter, who has been fascinated by Jack the Ripper from a tender age, won the coveted French Prix du Roman d’Aventures in 1988 and the prestigious Japanese Hunkaku Mystery Award 2005 for Le Brouillard Rouge (The Crimson Fog). View Less