Paul Halter

Paul Halter (born 19 June 1956 in Haguenau, Bas-Rhin) is a writer of crime fiction known for his locked room mysteries.

Halter pursued technical studies in his youth before joining the French Marines in the hope of seeing the world. Disappointed with the lack of travel, he left the military and, for a while, sold life insurance while augmenting his income playing the guitar in the local dance orchestra. He gave up life insurance for a job in the state-owned telecommunications company, where he works in what is now known as France Télécom. Halter has been compared with the late John Dickson Carr, generally considered the 20th century master of the locked room genre. Throughout his more than forty books his genre has been almost entirely impossible crimes, and as a critic has said "Although strongly influenced by Carr and Christie, his style is his own and he can stand comparison with anyone for the originality of his plots and puzzles and his atmospheric writing."

His first published novel, La Quatrieme Porte ("The Fourth Door") was published in 1988 and won the Prix de Cognac, given for detective literature. The following year, his novel Le Brouillard Rouge (Red Mist) won "one of the highest accolades in French mystery literature", the Prix du Roman d'Aventures. He has published more than forty books.Several of his short stories have been translated into English; by June 2010 six had appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; ten were collected and published by Wildside Press as The Night of the Wolf.