Pierre Henry is on the run, wanted for the double murder of his recent hosts, when he fortunately stumbles across juge d’instruction, M. Allou, who persuades him to tell his story. And it is quite a story.

It is a tale of an isolated castle near Versailles, the seat of the Comte de Saint-Luce, once an old friend of Henry, but now? Who knows?

It is the tale of a man who completely disappears from inside the castle, despite all exits to the building being sealed.

And it is the tale of the man who will die when the beast howls three times…

Locked Room International seems to be over since the tragic loss of John Pugmire, the publisher and translator of many of the titles that were originally written in French. The majority of these were the works of Paul Halter, but John also released titles from Golden Age authors, one of whom was Noel Vindry.

Vindry wrote twelve mystery novels and has been compared to John Dickson Carr. I came across a copy of this one by chance – you can’t buy LRI titles at the moment – and thought I’d take a look.

It’s interesting, certainly, primarily in the rather odd pacing. It takes an age for Henry to get to the end of his story, at which point Allou chats to a few people and reveals the truth. It’s probably a good thing that we don’t have too long to figure out what happened as the core idea is pretty obvious, I thought.

The first disappearance, however, is something else (although at the end of the day it means that the castle wasn’t quite as locked as we were led to believe.)

Where the book does work well, however, is first in the atmosphere of the castle, and the revelations at the end that make a point of covering every little odd bit of behaviour from beginning to end. It’s a very complete novel, with no words wasted and everything having a meaning.

It’s not a long book, but it’s definitely worth your while to track down a copy.