Locked room mystery

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Authors and works

One of the masters of the locked-room subgenre is John Dickson Carr. His novel The Hollow Man is considered by many to be the finest locked room mystery novel of all time—although Carr himself names Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room as his favourite. The Hollow Man gives an explicatory recipe for crime writers. Chapter 17 of the book, consists of a theoretical digression entitled "The Locked-Room Lecture". In it, Dr Gideon Fell (the detective) gives an extensive explanation of how the murderer is able to deceive everyone else (at least until the riddle is finally solved). How, for example, Fell asks, can the perpetrator create the impression of a hermetically sealed chamber when in fact it is not? What means are there of tampering with a door so that it seems to be locked on the inside? This is just one of the answers -- and, as it happens, a most simple one -- given by Fell:

Related Topics:
John Dickson Carr - The Hollow Man - Gaston Leroux - The Mystery of the Yellow Room - Gideon Fell

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: An illusion, simple but effective. The murderer, after committing his crime, has locked the door from the outside and kept the key. It is assumed, however, that the key is still in the lock on the inside. The murderer, who is first to raise a scare and find the body, smashes the upper glass panel of the door, puts his hand through with the key concealed in it, and finds the key in the lock inside, by which he opens the door. This device has also been used with the breaking of a panel out of an ordinary wooden door.

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Many authors have tried their hand at new and far-fetched yet eventually plausible locked-room scenarios, with one of the underlying principles always being that supernatural powers or any form of magic must be ruled out from the start. American writer Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) wrote Initials Only (1911), Margery Allingham (1904–1966) exploited the same motif in Flowers for the Judge (1936), and many more joined the ranks. Paul Auster's book, The Locked Room, takes its title from locked room mysteries.

Related Topics:
Anna Katharine Green - 1846 - 1935 - Initials Only - 1911 - Margery Allingham - 1904 - 1966 - Motif - Flowers for the Judge - 1936 - Paul Auster - The Locked Room

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Classic specimens of the genre include:

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• John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (1935), He Who Whispers (1946), The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), The Problem of the Green Capsule (1937) and The Crooked Hinge (1938)
• Carter Dickson's The Judas Window and The White Priory Murders
• Clayton Rawson's four Merlini novels, the most celebrated of which is the first, Death from a Top Hat (1938)
• Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds (1935) and Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938)
• Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death (1935)
• Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room
• Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery
• Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
• Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery
• Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit in which it appears the murderer has come back from the dead to take revenge on the living
• Melville Davisson Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery"
• Many of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, notably "The Secret Garden", "The Invisible Man," "The Wrong Shape," "The Oracle of the Dog," "The Dagger with Wings" and "The Miracle of Moon Crescent"
• French author Paul Halter (born in 1957) wrote over thirty locked room or impossible crime mysteries including La Malédiction de Barberousse, La Quatrième Porte, Le Brouillard Rouge, La Septième Hypothèseand Le Crime de Dédale. Strongly influenced by John Dickson Carr he is still much more than a copycat and developed a quite individual approach over the years. None of his books has been translated into English to date, but a short story of his, The Call of the Lorelei was published by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2004.