THE THIRTEENTH BULLET
LA 13e BALLE
Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:
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The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)
The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)
The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)
The Tiger’s Head (2013)
The Crimson Fog (2013)
The Night of the Wolf (2013) (collection)
The Invisible Circle (2014)
The Picture from the Past (2014)
The Phantom Passage (2015)
Death Invites You (2016)
The Vampire Tree (2016)
The Madman’s Room (2017)
The Man Who Loved Clouds (2018)
The Gold Watch (2019)
The Helm of Hades (2019) (collection)
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The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014
The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015
The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015
Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015
The Moai Island Puzzle (Alice Arisugawa) 2016
The Howling Beast (Noel Vindry) 2016
Death in the Dark (Stacey Bishop) 2017
The Ginza Ghost (Keikichi Osaka) 2017
Death in the House of Rain (Szu-Yen Lin) 2017
The Realm of the Impossible 2017 (anthology)
The Double Alibi (Noel Vindry) 2018
The 8 Manor Murders (Takemaru Abiko) 2018
Locked Room Murders (Robert Adey) 2018 (bibliography)
The Seventh Guest (Gaston Boca) 2018
The Flying Boat Mystery (Franco Vailati) 2019
Locked Room Murders Supplement (ed. Skupin) 2019
Death out of Nowhere (Gensoul & Grenier) 2020
The Red Locked Room (Tetsuya Ayukawa) 2020
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THE THIRTEENTH BULLET
Marcel Lanteaume
Translated by John Pugmire
The Thirteenth Bullet
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in French in 1948 by
S.E.P.E Le Labyrinth as La 13e Balle
Copyright © S.E.P.E 1948
THE THIRTEENTH BULLET
English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2019.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright. In the event of any inadvertent transgression of copyright, the editor would like to hear from the authors’ representatives. Please contact me at pugmire1@ yahoo.com.
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Lanteaume, Marcel
[La 13e Balle English]
The Thirteenth Bullet/Marcel Lanteaume
Translated from the French by John Pugmire
PREFACE
A shooting star, the dictionary tells us, is a visible meteor appearing as a temporary streak of light in the night sky. The phenomenon is therefore brilliant and fleeting. The same can be said for certain artists who distinguish themselves by the exceptional quality of their work before disappearing from sight.
English-language detective fiction has known such a prodigy: his name was Hake Talbot, who, in the 1940s, published two memorable and bewitching novels one after the other, before falling back into oblivion: The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944).
France had its own shooting star, at about the same period. One Marcel F. Lanteaume who, at the end of World War II, published three exceptional works: Orage sur la Grande Semaine (Storm Over Festival Week), Trompe-l’œil, and La Treizième Balle (The Thirteenth Bullet), before he, too, disappeared.
The personality of Marcel F. Lanteaume remained a mystery for almost twenty-five years, to the point that the late Michel Lebrun, novelist, critic and historian of French detective literature, suggested calling him Marcel L. Fanteaume—a phonetic play on the word for phantom—until he was successful in contacting him by letter in 1978, ten years before the latter’s ultimate disappearance. That was when it was learnt that he wrote the three novels between 1942 and 1944, to keep himself amused whilst he was in a stalag—a German prisoner-of-war camp:
“I wrote the three detective stories because I was so bored in captivity,” he declared. “During my work as an unskilled labourer in a foundry, and to fill the intellectual void that it entailed, I had plenty of time to refine my fantasies, and on Sundays, amidst the hubbub of a hundred and fifty captives, I wrote it all down.”
I am indebted to the author’s son, Marcel Louis Lanteaume, for some additional biographical detail.
Marcel Lanteaume (1902-1988) was born in Marseille. His family moved to Paris, where he completed his studies and ended up in an important position in a major insurance company.
He was, to nobody’s surprise, an excellent chess player. In the years before the war, he had been in the habit of playing chess via postcards, with correspondents in England, Italy and Germany. . . which had got him into trouble with military security during the period 1938-1939. Imagine, if you will, the reaction of the intelligence community to such communications as “Black Knight F7-H6”, or “White Bishop C5-G1”!
When war was declared, he was first stationed in Alsace, then later in the north. He managed to reach England in the Dunkirk evacuation but was summarily returned to France. He was taken prisoner and spent two years in the aforementioned stalag before escaping and eventually joining the French resistance. During the time he was in hiding, he managed to send the three manuscripts to his wife and son, together with an autobiography which was destroyed after his death.
In what order were the three books written? No one knows. Even though there may be clues in the text, they are simply referred to by their order of publication.
Published after the liberation of France in the collection Le Labyrinth, directed by the novelist Jacques Decrest, the three unique novels, the fruit of the unbridled, wild, weird and surprising imagination of a heretofore unknown author, nevertheless did not have the good fortune to please the readers of the day. Following sales judged insufficient by the editor, no further books were published, despite the first editions of the last two novels containing a mouth-watering list of books in preparation. According to his son, Marcel Lanteaume had indeed written other books, but, disappointed by failure, had destroyed the manuscripts. The enthusiast can only dream about such tantalising titles as: La Morte sous scellés (The Dead Woman under Seal), Le Barbier massacré (The Butchered Barber), Crime rue des Fantasques (Crime in Weird Street), La Vallée dans la brume (The Valley in the Mist) or La Plaine sous le soleil (The Plain under the Sun)…
“The three novels of Le Labyrinth were the only ones to see the light of day,” he told Michel Lebrun. “Of course, I did commit other crimes than those published, but I’m under no illusion, they’re definitely outdated.” His son confirmed that the three published were, unfortunately, the only ones to survive. What other marvels of superb logic and subtle wit did they engender? We shall never know.
The only element which might shine light o
n his tastes and his culture is his great capacity for reading: he was, before the war, an avid admirer of detective novels which he read in English, and of which he had a great collection. He probably read, before his compatriots, some of the great classics of Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr. His knowledge of the genre was apparent in a postscript to his letter to Lebrun, where he noted: “Have you noticed that I’m not the only one to have written out of boredom? Freeman Wills Crofts and S.S. Van Dine, amongst others, ‘profited’ from their sickness.”
Published in 1944, Orage sur la Grande Semaine joined the ranks of the classics of detective fiction, to the point of including, in the manner of Ellery Queen, a Challenge to the Reader. It was a model of the genre, posing a mind-boggling locked room puzzle. Flirting with the fantastic—alchemy, magic, and a secret society—it also had all the ingredients to please avid lovers of the mysteries of Clayton Rawson or John Dickson Carr.
Trompe-l’œil (Spring1946) was also a conjuring trick of stunning virtuosity, describing the theft of a famous diamond, exhibited in a room under surveillance by no less than six detectives of different nationalities hired by as many insurance companies—and therefore an incorruptible assembly. Nevertheless, the jewel, authentic when placed there by its owner, turned out to be false at the end of the day. And the explanation provided by the writer was without equal in the annals of detective fiction!
Could the author surpass himself in his grandiose madness? He did so with La Treizième Balle (Spring1948) which, in addition to posing an absolutely unique locked room puzzle—a crime in a bunker with one metre thick walls, no windows, and guarded by sentries—is principally based on the fascinating theme of the serial crime.
All the great names of detective fiction have quickly understood that, in its most classical form, serial crime offers infinite prospects. For, when a mysterious killer commits a series of crimes whose victims seem to have nothing to do with each other, the problem of motive is crucial.
Such is the case here, with the exploits of a killer dubbed the man in grey by the press, who commits murder in ten great French cities: Nancy, Dijon, Reims, Marseille, Orléans, Lyon, Toulouse, Arras, Nantes, le Mans... Scattered throughout the country, the victims all had different occupations and came from different strata of society. What is the mysterious thread they have in common? And when the investigators, after a breathless chase, discover it, the reader is plunged into even deeper stupefaction! Make no mistake, the criminal is by no means insane, and his incredible behaviour is the result of a logical plan. But the diabolical cleverness of the author is to know how, in the middle of the book, to reveal the hidden motive to the reader, so as to increase his bewilderment and greatly arouse his interest. Similar to what the great Agatha Christie did in the classic of the genre, The A.B.C. Murders (1936), in which a salesman, a waitress, an art collector and a spectator in a cinema are murdered seemingly haphazardly before the investigators discover that the victims’ names are... in alphabetic order. Or Ellery Queen in Cat of Many Tails, in which the ages of the victims, who do not know each other and come from different social classes, decrease as the list increases and the criminal, nicknamed “The Cat” by the press, continues his deadly activities....
There is, in the best serial killer novels, a kind of allegory of Destiny: the story follows the meanderings of a mysterious mechanism whose hidden workings invoke the ideas of inexorability and fate , as if something unknown had unleashed a criminal process which nobody after that could stop.
Finally, a small linguistic detail which English-speaking readers fluent in French will realise: the amateur detective in all three novels is named Bob Slowman. The author’s name Lanteaume is pronounced phonetically in French as lent homme, which translates to slow man in English.
But let me not keep you any longer from reading this fascinating work. I envy my transatlantic and trans-channel friends discovering this exceptional novel, finally translated into English.
Roland Lacourbe
Paris 2020
Roland Lacourbe is an internationally recognised expert on locked room/impossible crime mysteries. J.M.P
Spectators who, out of politeness, applaud bad theatre are themselves performing good theatre.
EVREINOFF
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
I have used the French term for professions and places mentioned in the text, in order to preserve the Gallic flavour. Below is a list of correspondences:
juge d’instruction = examining magistrate
Le Parquet = public prosecutor’s office
Quai des Orfèvres = home of the Paris Prefecture of Police
Garde des Sceaux = Ministry of Justice
Les Halles = Paris central fresh food market
commissaire = superintendent
brigadier = sergeant
police judiciaire = detective division
médecin légiste = medical examiner
mairie = town hall
Monsieur de Paris = the nickname given to Charles-Henri Sanson, a famous executioner
FIRST PART
____
______________________________
TWELVE CRIMES
(Editor’s account)
I
NANCY-DIJON – TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE
Wednesday, November 10
In that beginning of November 19.., in the east of France, the winter began prematurely to chase away the autumn, which did not give in without a struggle. Dark, ice-cold days, shivering under a sombre sky, were succeeded, increasingly rarely, by warm hours, gilded by a sun too low in the sky, and too rapid a sunset. The leaves, more rust-coloured every day, clung desperately to the branches.
The town of Nancy, despite its slightly affected languor, could not ignore the all too predictable outcome.
M. Berger, examining magistrate , warming his numb fingers in front of the office radiator, was giving vent to his clerk with bleak comments that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the overly-slow progress of the matters in hand. The magistrate blamed fate for having brought him to this town to prosecute boring little crimes. Until the most recent one....
His clerk, a small man of indeterminate age with white hairs sprouting under a long nose, eyes blinking behind metal spectacles, and a rounded back, was busy recopying an interrogation. The sound of the telephone ringing interrupted the diatribe. Holding back a sigh of relief with great effort, the clerk picked up the receiver.
‘M. Belhomme, juge d’instruction for Dijon wishes to speak to you.’
Looking bewildered, the Nancy magistrate began a conversation, limited on his side to monosyllables.
After he hung up, M. Berger, who was consumed by a perpetual need to talk about his acts, his words and even his thoughts, explained:
‘It’s really strange that my colleague from Le Parquet de Dijon should call me just as... In a word, the day before yesterday they had
a crime which, in many respects, was just like ours. I mean the Eberhardt case. As far as I can make out, the facts are the same and the similarity struck my colleague. I shall be getting his report, but, as of now, I know that their victim also died from a bullet to the heart. Obviously we need to check, and M. Belhomme asked if his expert, in conjunction with ours, could compare the two projectiles.’
The prospects of success were so discouraging that our magistrate could see nothing but good in handing the case over, even partially. Few cases looked as bleak: no clues, no obvious motive, and therefore every chance of failure. And, in the unlikely event of success, no benefit to be derived. The crime was not of the kind to attract journalistic attention or pique the public’s curiosity.
On that last point he was wrong. To be fair, he could not have anticipated the avalanche of events which would follow this seemingly non-descript, everyday murder. He could not have foreseen that, over the coming months, the public would become engrossed by the battle being fought by society against a super-criminal who seeme
d to kill at random, without reason, and for his own pleasure. Or that the lure of mystery would change, first into obsession, then fear; that panic would grip the public and their emotion would intensify until it reached a paroxysm unequalled in history, to the point that even the insitutions themselves would be threatened.
The previous Thursday, November 4, 19.., after a dismal day under a grey sky, snow had appeared at a twilight rendered even darker by contrast with the white. The fine flakes, driven by the wind from the east, lashed the passers-by furiously as they hastened back to their homes and their steaming-hot meals. Away from the town centre with its brasseries and cafes, lit by signs and window displays, the town quickly went to sleep, huddling under the white blanket. The storm lasted three hours.
At the far end of Faubourg Saint-Jean, between Rue Mon-Désert and Rue de Villers, a normally quiet area, silence descended early, punctuated only by the occasional barking of guard dogs.
The next morning, autumn having temporarily regained the upper hand, the dawn was glorious. In a clear blue sky, with but a trace of mist, the sun rose bright red. The passers-by, barely awake and with cheeks rosy from the glare, went about their business with their overcoat collars up to their ears. The commercial vehicles delivering bread or milk to distant customers made a deadened sound on the muffled roads. The snow, knowing its existence would be brief, quickly became iridescent with the warm tones, rose or blue, which Ivan Choultsé had captured so well with the tip of his paintbrush.
The Thirteenth Bullet Page 1