Locked room mystery

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Examples

The following are examples of "impossible" or "locked-room" crimes:

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• The only door, locked from the inside, has to be forced open (and the position of the body clearly suggests that the victim could not have locked it after being struck down by the killer).
• There is no fireplace or chimney through which the murderer might have escaped.
• The only window is barred from the inside, or there is virgin snow on the window sill outside.
• There is no secret passage leading to, or trapdoor anywhere in, the room.
• The murder weapon is nowhere to be found although the victim has clearly been poisoned, stabbed, shot or strangled (with the cause of death established beyond doubt in an autopsy some time later).
• If the victim has been electrocuted, no live wires can be found anywhere near the corpse; if they have been shot, no one within usual hearing distance remembers hearing a report.

These "facts" strain the interest of the reader, and build up a palpitating curiosity to crack the truth, and explains the huge popularity of such novels. In many locked room mysteries, plausibility was neglected in favour of ingenuity and maximum reader involvement to appeal to this sense of curious suspense. Among avid readers, heated discussions ensued after the publication of a particular novel on whether it is really possible to commit the perfect murder the way it is described in the book.

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Some example loopholes that a reader may find:

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• If the victim is found stabbed in a locked room on one of the upper floors of a building, no murder weapon is found and a window giving onto a backyard has been left open, could they have been killed by a professional knife-thrower from the building across the yard by means of a knife to which a long cord was attached? (This is a variation on the "dagger with wings" idea.)
• Can eye-witnesses be deluded into thinking they have seen a particular person enter or leave a room when in fact what they saw was just an image in a mirror?
• Can people gain access to a house by posing as someone else, wearing clothes made of paper, and then getting rid of them—as they would be evidence if they did not—by burning them in the open fire?
• The "polar poniard", a dagger made of ice that melts before the murder is discovered.