THE THIRTEENTH BULLET
LA 13e BALLE
Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:
The Lord of Misrule (2010)
The Fourth Door (2011)
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)
The White Lady (2020)
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The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Torok) 2012
The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014
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
