Locked-room

mystery

The "locked-room" or "impossible crime"

mystery is a type of crime seen in crime
and detective fiction. The crime in
question, typically murder ("locked-room
murder"), is committed in circumstances
under which it appeared impossible for the
perpetrator to enter the crime scene,
commit the crime, and leave undetected.[1]
The crime in question typically involves a
situation whereby an intruder could not
have left; for example the original literal
"locked room": a murder victim found in a
windowless room locked from the inside
at the time of discovery. Following other
conventions of classic detective fiction,
the reader is normally presented with the
puzzle and all of the clues, and is
encouraged to solve the mystery before
the solution is revealed in a dramatic
climax.
Sherlock Holmes searches for clues in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892), following a murder in a room where
the door had been locked from the inside

The prima facie impression of seeing a

locked room crime is that the perpetrator
is a dangerous, supernatural entity capable
of defying the laws of nature by walking
through walls or vanishing into thin air. The
need for a rational explanation for the
crime is what drives the protagonist to
look beyond these appearances and solve
the puzzle.

History of the genre

The earliest fully-fledged example of this
type of story is generally held to be Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue
Morgue" (1841).[1][2] Robert Adey credits
Sheridan Le Fanu for A Passage in the
Secret History of an Irish Countess (1838),
which was published three years before
Poe's “Rue Morgue”.[1] Other early locked-
room mysteries include Israel Zangwill's
The Big Bow Mystery (1892);[3] "The
Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892)
and "The Adventure of the Empty House"
(1903), two Sherlock Holmes stories by
Arthur Conan Doyle; "The Problem of Cell
13" (1905) by Jacques Futrelle, featuring
"The Thinking Machine" Augustus S. F. X.
Van Dusen;[3] and Le Mystère de la
Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow
Room), written in 1907 by French journalist
and author Gaston Leroux.[3]

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories

often featured locked-room mysteries,[3]
and other mystery authors have also
dabbled in the genre, such as S. S. Van
Dine in The Canary Murder Case (1927),[3]
Ellery Queen in The Chinese Orange
Mystery (1934),[3] and Freeman Wills
Crofts in such novels as Sudden Death and
The End of Andrew Harrison.[3]

John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as

Carter Dickson, was known as "master of
the locked-room mystery".[4] His 1935
novel The Hollow Man (US title: The Three
Coffins) was in 1981 voted the best
locked-room mystery novel of all time by
17 authors and reviewers,[5][6] although
Carr himself names Gaston Leroux's The
Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907–1908)
as his favorite.[5] (Leroux's novel was
named third in that same poll; Hake
Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) was named
second.[5]) Three other Carr/Dickson
novels were in the top ten of the 1981 list:
The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Judas
Window (1938), and The Peacock Feather
Murders (1937).[5]

In French, Pierre Boileau, Thomas

Narcejac, Gaston Boca, Marcel
Lanteaume, Pierre Véry, Noel Vindry, and
the Belgian Stanislas-André Steeman were
other important "impossible crime" writers,
Vindry being the most prolific with 16
novels. Edgar Faure, later to become Prime
Minister of France, was a not particularly
successful contemporary.
During the Golden Age of Detective Fiction,
English-speaking writers dominated the
genre, but after the 1940s there was a
general waning of English-language
output. French authors continued writing
into the 1950s and early 1960s, notably
Martin Meroy and Boileau-Narcejac, who
joined forces to write several locked-room
novels. They also co-authored the
psychological thrillers which brought them
international fame, two of which were
adapted for the screen as Vertigo (1954
novel; 1958 film) and Diabolique (1955
film). The most prolific writer during the
period immediately following the Golden
Age was Japanese: Akimitsu Takagi wrote
almost 30 locked-room mysteries, starting
in 1949 and continuing to his death in
1995. A number have been translated into
English. In Robert van Gulik's mystery
novel The Chinese Maze Murders (1951),
one of the cases solved by Judge Dee is
an example of the locked-room subgenre.

The genre continued into the 1970s and

beyond. Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective
novels feature locked-room puzzles. The
most prolific creator of impossible crimes
is Edward D. Hoch, whose short stories
feature a detective, Dr. Sam Hawthorne,
whose main role is as a country physician.
The majority of Hoch stories feature
impossible crimes; one appeared in EQMM
every month from May 1973 through
January 2008. Hoch's protagonist is a
gifted amateur detective who uses pure
brainpower to solve his cases.

The French writer Paul Halter, whose

output of over 30 novels is almost
exclusively of the locked-room genre, has
been described as the natural successor
to John Dickson Carr.[5] Although strongly
influenced by Carr and Agatha Christie,[6]
he has a unique writing style featuring
original plots and puzzles. A collection of
ten of his short stories, entitled The Night
of the Wolf, has been translated into
English. The Japanese writer Soji Shimada
has been writing impossible crime stories
since 1981. The first, The Tokyo Zodiac
Murders (1981), and the second, Murder in
the Crooked House (1982), are the only
ones to have been translated into English.
The themes of the Japanese novels are far
more grisly and violent than those of the
more genteel Anglo-Saxons.
Dismemberment is a preferred murder
method. Despite the gore, most norms of
the classic detective fiction novel are
strictly followed.

Umberto Eco, in his 2000 novel Baudolino,

takes the locked-room theme into
medieval times. The book's plot suggests
that Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had
not drowned in a river, as history records,
but died mysteriously at night while a
guest at the castle of a sinister Armenian
noble. The book features various suspects,
each of whom had a clever means of
killing the Emperor without entering the
room where he slept – all these means
having been available in medieval times.

The locked-room genre also appears in

children's detective fiction, although the
crime committed is usually less severe
than murder. One notable author is Enid
Blyton, who wrote several juvenile
detective series, often featuring seemingly
impossible crimes that her young amateur
detectives set out to solve. The Hardy
Boys novel While the Clock Ticked was
(originally) about a locked and isolated
room where a man seeks privacy, but
receives mysterious threatening
messages there. The messages are
delivered by a mechanical device lowered
into the room through a chimney. King
Ottokar's Sceptre (1938–1939) is the only
Tintin adventure that is a locked-room
mystery. No homicide is involved; rather
the crime is the disappearance of the royal
sceptre, which is bound to have disastrous
consequences for the king.
The British TV series Jonathan Creek has a
particular 'speciality' for locked-room-
murder style mysteries. The eponymous
protagonist, Jonathan Creek, designs
magic tricks for stage magicians, and is
often called on to solve cases where the
most important element of the mystery is
clearly how the crime was committed,
such as a man who allegedly shot himself
in a sealed bunker when he had crippling
arthritis in his hands, how a woman was
shot in a sealed room with no gun and
without the window being opened or
broken, how a dead body could have
vanished from a locked room when the
only door was in full view of someone else,
etc.

Pulp magazines in the 1930s often

contained impossible crime tales, dubbed
weird menace, in which a series of
supernatural or science-fiction type events
is eventually explained rationally. Notable
practitioners of the period were Fredric
Brown, Paul Chadwick and, to a certain
extent, Cornell Woolrich, although these
writers tended to rarely use the Private Eye
protagonists that many associate with
pulp fiction. Quite a few comic book
impossible crimes seem to draw on the
"weird menace" tradition of the pulps.
However, celebrated writers such as G. K.
Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Clayton
Rawson, and Sax Rohmer have also had
their works adapted to comic book form.
In 1934, Dashiell Hammett created the
comic strip Secret Agent X9, illustrated by
Alex Raymond, which contained a locked-
room episode. One American comic book
series that made good use of locked-room
mysteries is Mike W. Barr's Maze Agency.

In the 21st century, examples of popular

detective series novels that include
locked-room type puzzles are The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larssen,
Bloodhounds (2004) by Peter Lovesey, and
In the Morning I'll Be Gone (2014) by Adrian
McKinty.

Real-life examples
Joseph Bowne Elwell
According to a report in The New York
Times, March 10 and 11, 1929, Isidore
Fink, of 4 East 132nd Street, New York
City, was in his Fifth Avenue laundry on
the night of March 9, 1929, with the
windows closed and door of the room
bolted. A neighbor heard screams and
the sound of blows, but not shots, and
called the police, who were unable to get
in. A young boy was lifted through the
transom and was able to unbolt the
door. The police found Fink dead with
two bullet wounds in his chest and one
in his left wrist. No money had been
taken, and no weapon was found at the
scene. It was theorised that the
murderer may have climbed the outside
of the building and fired through the
transom, but a powder burn on Fink's
wrist indicated that he had been shot at
close range. Interviewed some years
later, Police Commissioner Mulrooney
called the Fink murder an "insoluble
mystery".[7]
On May 16, 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was
found stabbed to death in an otherwise
empty first-class compartment of the
Paris Métro. The subway train had left
the terminus, Porte de Charenton, at
6:27 p.m. and had arrived at the next
station, Porte Dorée, at 6:28 p.m.
Witnesses did not see anyone else enter
or leave the compartment where Mlle.
Toureaux's body was found. The
murderer had one minute and twenty
seconds at their disposal. Neither the
murderer nor the method of their escape
was ever discovered.[8]
In 2010, the uninjured dead body of
Gareth Williams, an employee of the
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), was
 found in a bag that was zipped up and
padlocked from the outside, with a key
inside. There was no forensic evidence
of anyone else's involvement. Despite
suggestions that he had somehow
locked himself inside the bag, two
escapologists failed to replicate the feat
despite 400 attempts, though one would
not rule it out.[9]

See also
Closed circle of suspects (genre)

References
1. Penzler, Otto (28 December 2014). "The
Locked Room Mysteries: As a new
 collection of the genre's best is published,
its editor Otto Penzler explains the rules of
engagement" (https://www.independent.co.
uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-l
ocked-room-mysteries-as-a-new-collection-
of-the-genre-s-best-is-published-its-editor-ot
to-9947360.html) . The Independent.
Retrieved 22 January 2019.

2. Eschner, Kat (20 April 2017). "Without Edgar

Allan Poe, We Wouldn't Have Sherlock
Holmes" (https://www.smithsonianmag.co
m/smart-news/edgar-allan-poe-invented-de
tective-story-180962914/) . Smithsonian.
Retrieved 22 January 2019.

3. Ousby, Ian (1997). Guilty Parties. Thames &

Hudson. pp. 70–71. ISBN 0-500-27978-0.
4. McKinty, Adrian (29 January 2014). "The
top 10 locked-room mysteries" (https://ww
w.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/29/top
-10-locked-room-mysteries-adrian-mckint
y) . The Guardian. Retrieved 22 January
2019.

5. Pugmire, John. "A Locked Room Library" (ht

tp://mysteryfile.com/Locked_Rooms/Librar
y.html) . Mysteryfile.com. Retrieved
22 January 2019.

6. "Why are locked room mysteries so

popular?" (https://www.bbc.com/news/ma
gazine-18108498) . BBC. 21 May 2012.
Retrieved 22 January 2019.

7. Fort, Charles (1975), The Complete Books

of Charles Fort, p. 916
 8. Finley-Croswhite, Annette; Brunelle, Gayle K.
(2006), Murder in the Metro (http://www.od
u.edu/ao/instadv/quest/metromurder.htm
l) , Old Dominion University, retrieved
2008-03-03

9. "Gareth Williams: the key unanswered

questions" (https://www.theguardian.com/
uk/2012/may/02/gareth-williams-key-unan
swered-questions) . The Guardian. 2 May
2012. Retrieved 21 May 2019.

Further reading
"The Locked Room" (https://books.googl
e.com/books?id=h7OsO8GyjaAC&dq=Lo
cked%20room&pg=PA7) . Donald E.
Westlake. Murderous Schemes: An
Anthology of Classic Detective Stories.
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Chapters 19,20,22 (https://books.googl
e.com/books?id=jsxTenuOQKgC&dq=Lo
cked%20room&pg=PA176) . John T.
Irwin. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe,
Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story.
JHU Press, 1996. 482 pages.
Crime Fiction (https://books.google.co
m/books?id=zE61mBimWB4C&dq=inaut
hor%3A%22John%20Scaggs%22&pg=P
A8) by John Scaggs. Routledge, 2005.
184 pages.
Michael Cook. Narratives of Enclosure in
Detective Fiction: The Locked Room
 Mystery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 210
pages.

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