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In crime fiction, a locked room mystery (or cosy) is a particular kind of mystery story or whodunit, where a murder or crime is apparently committed under impossible circumstances: no one could have entered or left the scene of the crime, and the death involved could not have been a suicide.
Such stories normally follow other conventions of detective fiction, in that the reader is presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and so encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution.
Typically, a "locked room" in this narrow meaning of the word is a room in which a murder is committed. There are a limited number of suspects, some of them possibly even without a watertight alibi. But on closer inspection, it turns out that no one could possibly have perpetrated the murder, because at the time the murder was committed, there was definitely no way of entering or leaving the room unseen or without leaving a trace.
The prima facie impression, almost invariably would be that the perpetrator has vanished into thin air.
History
Even though the mystery or detective genre wasn't established until the 19th and 20th centuries, the apocryphal Biblical story of Bel and the Dragon has some similarities to locked room mysteries.
However, the earliest modern example of this type of story is generally held to be Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The story contains Poe's statement of the "rules" of the locked-room mystery.
Another notable early example was written by French journalist and author, Gaston Leroux with Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room ) (1908). Locked room mysteries flourished with the popularity of writers like John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and Agatha Christie.
Examples
The following are examples of "impossible" or "locked-room" crimes:
- The only door, locked from the inside, has to be forced open by those who discover the victim (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 gunshot.
These "facts" obtain the interest of the reader, and build up a palpitating curiosity to find a solution to the seemingly impossible crime. This explains the huge popularity of such novels to their fans. In many locked room mysteries, plausibility is neglected in favour of maximum ingenuity, reader involvement, and suspense. Among avid readers, heated discussions can ensue after the publication of a particular novel as to whether it is really possible to commit the perfect murder the way described.
Some example loopholes that a reader may find:
- 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?
- How plausible is the "polar poniard", a dagger made of ice that melts before the murder is discovered?
- The victim has already been murdered in a different place to where they were discovered and then the body transported to the 'locked room' (obviously the time of death is usually found out at the post-mortem and is usually the last clue if this is the case).
Authors and works
One of the masters of the locked-room subgenre was 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:
- * 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.
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. Douglas G. Greene and Robert C.S. Adey's Death Locked In is an anthology of some of the classics of the genre.
Classic specimens of the genre include:
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892) and The Adventure of the Empty House (1903) confront Sherlock Holmes with a locked room mystery
- L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros" (1897) deals with a hate crime against a Greek American moneylender, and is a "perfect murder" story told by the murderer "on what he thought was his death bed" to the narrator.
- 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 Then There Were None (1939) 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.
- In Over My Dead Body, a play by Michael Sutton and Anthony Fingleton, three aging mystery writers attempt to stage a locked room mystery involving a man in a gorilla costume found shot, stabbed, and hung in a third-story room where the only door is locked, with the key on the inside and a dresser blocking the door. *
- The best reference on the sub-genre is still Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (Crossover Press, 1991), which lists nearly all books that feature locked room mysteries in all its variations and glimpses into their solutions
In Television and Film
- Jonathan Creek, the UK television series, combines this theme with that of stage magic.
- Banacek is an American television series whose investigator hero specializes in locked-room thefts and other "impossible" mysteries. Typical examples are the theft of valuable paintings from a moving truck that was being watched by guards in a trailing vehicle; the vanishing of a rocket engine from a display stage when the lights momentarily went out; and the disappearance of a football player beneath a pile of tacklers while in full view of thousands of spectators and a live TV audience.
- Case Closed/Detective Conan is a detective anime/manga that features numerous "locked room" scenarios, among others.
- Crime Scene Investigation, has multiple episodes with locked-room scenarios, most notably season 3 episode 13, Random Acts of Violence, wherein a man was murdered in sealed computer server room.
- Flightplan with Jodie Foster is based on a variation of the locked-room mystery, set on a plane in midflight.
- The TV series Monk (starring Tony Shaloub) featured several locked room puzzles, such as death by drowning seconds after jumping from a plane but landing on dry land, a killing in another place committed by a heavy man who was bedridden and murder that looked like an accident as the victim was crushed by a heavy barbell alone in his locked apartment.
- Blacke's Magic featuring Hal Linden as a magician who solves murders with their own magical qualities.
External link
"Locked room mystery"