Locked-room mystery

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Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. The locked-room mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under circumstances under which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime and/or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of the crime scene. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left, i.e., a locked room. 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.

To investigators of the crime, the prima facie impression almost invariably is that the perpetrator has vanished 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

Though the mystery or detective genre was not established until the 19th century, there are notable predecessors in ancient writings. The deuterocanonical Old Testament story "Bel and the Dragon" has some similarities to locked-room mysteries; the hero Daniel debunks the worship of an idol that supposedly eats food offerings left for it in a sealed room, by exposing the secret entrance used by the priests who take the food for themselves. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus told the tale of the robber whose headless body was found in a sealed stone chamber with only one guarded exit. Honoré de Balzac in La Comedie Humaine (1799–1850): Maitre Cornelius (1846) and Alexandre Dumas, père in Les Mohicans de Paris: La Visite Domiciliaire (1854) included locked-room elements in their novels.

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). Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) features a rudimentary locked-room murder. A number of authors, including Joseph Conrad, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Dick Donovan, tried their hand at the new genre, but their ingenuity extended only to secret passages, duplicate keys, and diabolical mechanical devices. It was not until publication of Israel Zangwill's seminal The Big Bow Mystery (1892) that the hallmark of every great impossible crime—misdirection—made its appearance, introducing a murder technique much emulated since. The other great early work, Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), was written in 1907 by French journalist and author Gaston Leroux; it, too, has had many imitators.

In the Golden Age of Detective Fiction impossible crimes were mainly solved by brilliant amateur sleuths, inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes, who were inexplicably given free rein by Scotland Yard and, to a markedly lesser extent in their American equivalents, the New York Police Department; puzzling mysteries were solved by sheer reasoning and brain power. Such creators of famous Anglo-Saxon amateur detectives as Jacques Futrelle, Thomas and Mary Hanshew, G. K. Chesterton, Carolyn Wells, John Dickson Carr, C. Daly King, and Joseph Commings turned out novels featuring impossible crimes in vast quantities. To a lesser degree, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Clayton Rawson, and Hake Talbot did the same. Authors such as Nigel Morland and Anthony Wynne, whose output leaned more toward science-based detective stories, also tried their hand at impossible mysteries.

In French, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Gaston Boca, Marcel Lanteaume, Pierre Very, Noel Vindry and the Belgian Stanislas-Andre 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.

The genre continued into the 1970s. 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. Although strongly influenced by Carr and Agatha Christie, 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 and has created 13 to date.[when?] The first, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), is the only one 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, the norms of the classic detective fiction novel are strictly followed.

Umberto Eco, in the 2000 novel Baudolino, takes the locked-room theme into medieval times. The book's plot suggests that Emperor Frederick I had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted 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.

Children's literature

The locked-room genre has also been translated into children's detective fiction, although the crime committed is usually less severe than murder. One notable example would be Enid Blyton, who wrote several juvenile detective series, often featuring seemingly impossible crimes that her young amateur detectives set out to solve.

King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938–1939) is the only Tintin adventure that is a locked-room mystery. No homicide is involved. The crime is the disappearance of the royal sceptre that is bound to have disastrous consequences for the king.

Television

Locked-room mysteries have also seen success on TV; for example, in the BBC TV series Jonathan Creek, the eponymous detective (whose regular job is designing conjuring tricks) regularly solves apparently impossible murders.

Examples

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

  • A woman and her daughter are murdered in an inaccessible room, which is locked from the inside. The mother's throat is cut so badly that her head is barely attached, and the daughter is found strangled and stuffed into a chimney. ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), a short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
  • A British minister is threatened. Investigations commence, newspapers report, Scotland Yard offers protection. Even though the assassins precisely predict the minister's death, the vast police force protecting him at the time and place announced by the assassins cannot prevent the murder. The minister is alone in a room, locked from within and protected from without. The room is empty of all but the murdered man and even upon finding the corpse, it cannot be determined from what cause the man died. (The Four Just Men (1905), first in a series of novels by Edgar Wallace)
  • A man is found on a rock with his throat cut in the middle of a footprint-free stretch of sand wet from the receding tide. The crime is so recent that the victim's blood has not yet clotted, yet the occupants of a fishing boat less than 100 yards (90 m) away swear they saw nobody approach the rock for hours. (Have His Carcase (1932), a novel by Dorothy L. Sayers)
  • The victim is walking alone in the middle of a snow-covered street. A voice is heard to threaten him, and a shot rings out. An examination of his body shows the shot was fired from close range, but no killer is to be seen and no other footprints are found on the scene. (The Hollow Man (1935)(U.S. title: The Three Coffins (1935)), a novel by John Dickson Carr)
  • A man is seen by several witnesses committing a crime during which he dies. Investigation indicates he was still alive after the crime, and his death, took place. ("The Amorous Corpse", a short story by Peter Lovesey; "Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer", a short story by Edward D. Hoch)
  • A man dies in a room at the top of a tower in a Scottish castle that is believed to be haunted. Similar deaths occur. Despite evidence showing the people had no reason to kill themselves, they are shown to have been alone at the time of the murder. (The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), a novel by John Dickson Carr)
  • The drunken brother of a billionaire industrialist fires an empty gun in the direction of his brother, who is some distance away sealed inside a safe room. At that precise moment, the industrialist is shot, and no gun can be found in the sealed and guarded room. (The King is Dead (1951), a novel by Ellery Queen)
  • A man is shot in a guarded room, while the still-smoking gun was delivered next door in a sealed envelope prior to the shots being fired. ("The X Street Murders" (1962), a short story by Joseph Commings)
  • A man volunteers to spend the night in an attic room reputedly haunted by the spirit of a woman stabbed to death there in impossible circumstances. The door is sealed. When the seals are broken, a complete stranger lies there dead from stab wounds and the other man has vanished. (La Quatrieme Porte by Paul Halter)
  • A man is found dead, and his wife dying, in a room locked from the inside. She had been able to call for help after shots were heard. There is no gun in the room and a search reveals no other person present. (Six Crimes Sans Assassin by Pierre Boileau)
  • A woman is found dead in a room with her ex-husband, with the gun that killed her in his hand. Although the gun is proven to have killed her, her ex-husband is a detective whom the reader has grown to trust over a long series of short stories featuring him as the explainer of locked-room mysteries. ("The Leopold Locked Room", a short story by Edward D. Hoch)
  • A man is stabbed to death in a summer house to which every access route is guarded and in which no weapon is to be found. ("The Oracle of the Dog", a short story by G. K. Chesterton)
  • A horse and buggy vanish in a covered bridge. Their tracks can be seen going in to the bridge, but none come out on the other side. ("The Problem of the Covered Bridge", a short story by Edward D. Hoch)
  • The audience is allowed to inspect the magician's cabinet from all sides before he steps inside to perform his vanishing trick and the curtain descends. When the curtain goes up again, the magician is still in the cabinet—strangled. ("Death by Black Magic", a short story by Joseph Commings)
  • A woman is found killed in a room with one entrance by trauma and exsanguination. The entryway was already blocked with a chair before anyone found the corpse. ("Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc", a 2010 PSP video game developed by Spike Chunsoft)

Authors and works

The acknowledged master of the locked-room subgenre was John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson.

His novel The Hollow Man (1935) was voted the best locked-room mystery novel of all time by 17 authors and reviewers, although Carr himself names Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907-1908) as his favorite. (Leroux's novel was named third in that same poll; Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) was named second.[1])

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, the 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.

There are six other categories of locked room as expounded by Dr. Fell. Clayton Rawson in Death from a Top Hat (1938) describes nine. Anthony Boucher in Nine Times Nine and Derek Smith in Whistle Up the Devil are two other authors to offer comprehensive overviews of locked-room methods. The reader is warned: while these lectures may well be erudite and educational in their own right, their true purpose in each case is to divert attention from the method actually used in the book.

Examples

English-language novels

English-language short stories and novellas

French-language novels

  • Jean Alessandrini's La Quadrature du meurtre (2006)
  • Gaston Boca's L'Ombre sur le jardin (1933)
  • Pierre Boileau's Le Repos de Bacchus (1938) and Six crimes sans assassin (1939)—which contains no less than six impossible murders
  • Boileau-Narcejac's Les Magiciennes (1957) and L'Ingenieur Aimait Trop Les Chiffres (1959)
  • Gensoul, A. & Grenier, C.'s La Mort vient de nulle part (1945)
  • Paul Halter's:
    • La Quatrieme Porte (1987)
    • Le Cercle Invisible (1996)
    • Les Sept Merveilles du Crime (1997) in which Monsieur Halter baffles his readers with an astonishing seven impossible crimes.
    • La Toile de Pénélope (2001)
  • Herbert, M. & Wyl, E.'s La Maison interdite
  • Marcel Lanteaume's:
    • La Treizieme balle (1942)
    • Trompe l'oeil (1946)
  • Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907)
  • Thomas Narcejac's:
    • L'Assassin de Minuit (1945)
    • La Mort est du Voyage (1948)
  • Noel Vindry's:
    • La Maison Qui Tue (1932)
    • La Bete Hurlante (1934)
    • A Travers les Murailles (1937)

French-language short stories

  • Pierre Boileau's "La Main qui referma la porte" (1956)
  • Boileau-Narcejac's "Au Bois Dormant" (1956)
  • Paul Halter's The Night of the Wolf (2006) collection, three of which short stories: "The Call of the Lorelei", "The Tunnel of Death", and "The Night of the Wolf", have been published in English in EQMM, together with a fourth: "The Robber's Grave" (2007)
  • Maurice Leblanc's Therese and Germaine (1922)
  • Maurice Leblanc's "Arsène Lupin en prison" (1905)
  • Georges Simenon's "La Fenêtre Ouverte" (1936)

Japanese-language novels

Japanese-language short stories

Other examples

For a detailed and comprehensive historical review of the field, together with descriptions of over 2000 novels and short stories featuring impossible crimes, consult Robert Adey's exhaustive bibliography Locked Room Murders (1979 and 1991), which is the definitive work on the subgenre.

French-speaking readers may consult Chambres Closes, Crimes Impossibles(1997), edited by Soupart, Fooz and Bourgeois or, for a more detailed analysis of a more limited number of works, Roland Lacourbe's 99 Chambres Closes.

Japanese-speaking enthusiasts may enjoy An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891–1998 (text by Alice Arisugawa and illustrations by Kazuichi Isoda), which contains summaries of 40 novels and short stories, 20 of which are Anglo-Saxon classics; the other 20 are Japanese classics from 1924 to the present day. A striking feature of the book is the double-page graphic explanation of each problem.

In early 2007, Roland Lacourbe formed a panel of like-minded enthusiasts to recommend a list of the best 99 novels to form the nucleus of a locked-room library. The results can be found via the external link A Locked Room Library.

Film, radio, and television

Film

  • The movies Flightplan (2005) and Fracture (2007) both contain variations on the locked-room mystery. In the former, a child disappears from an airplane in the middle of a flight; in the latter, the alleged killer makes the murder weapon disappear despite his house being surrounded by police.
  • Pandorum (2009) is a German-United States post-apocalyptic science fiction film, with elements of locked-room mystery, horror, and survival adventure.
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) and the English language remake, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) films.

Radio

  • In the 1940s and 1950s John Dickson Carr wrote a series of radio plays for the BBC's Appointment with Fear, and subsequently for CBS' Suspense series. Recordings of these plays are readily available on CD and the transcripts of many can be found in two collections: The Door to Doom and The Dead Sleep Lightly, both edited by Douglas G. Greene.

Television

  • In the cold open for the pilot episode of the science fiction series, Alphas, an Alpha uses a sniper rifle pre-positioned at a building vent to make an impossible shot, killing a man inside a secure room. The team investigates the shooting to determine how the Alpha's ability works.
  • Banacek was an American television series about an investigator specializing in locked-room thefts and other seemingly impossible mysteries.
  • Blacke's Magic featured a magician who used his skills to solve seemingly magical events.
  • Death in Paradise, TV series in which almost every episode featured an 'impossible' crime (many of them locked-room mysteries). The plot centres on the character of strait-laced British policeman Richard Poole (Ben Miller), a detective from London's Metropolitan Police. He is sent to the fictional Caribbean island of Saint-Marie to solve the case of the death of a fellow British policeman. After solving the death of his predecessor, he ends up becoming the local police force's new detective.
  • The most recent television-based incarnation of Ellery Queen contained a number of locked-room puzzles and impossible crimes (including "The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep").
  • Jonathan Creek, not a magician himself but a designer of magic tricks, featured in a BBC UK television series in which almost every episode featured an 'impossible' crime (many of them locked-room mysteries).
  • The Japanese TV drama Kagi no Kakatta Heya (The Locked-Room Murders) is based on the Yusuke Kishi novel of the same name. Each episode follows a pair of attorneys and a lock enthusiast from a security company as they solve locked-room mysteries.
  • The TV series Monk (starring Tony Shalhoub) featured several locked-room puzzles, such as a Navy lieutenant shot dead in his cabin on a submarine ("Mr. Monk Is Underwater"), when the gunshot was heard by witnesses outside, or a monkey that supposedly shot its master when he barricaded himself in his panic room during a burglary ("Mr. Monk and the Panic Room").
  • The 2nd episode of BBC's Sherlock, "The Blind Banker", features a variant of this scenario. A code is left painted on the wall of an office in a bank, the perpetrator vanishing seemingly without a trace as the only door into the office is remotely locked and nobody had opened it on the night of the incident. This is also used on the two murder victims, both of whom were shot and killed in their seemingly impenetrable apartments. The third episode of season three, "The Sign of Three" also had a locked-room mystery variant.
  • The TV series Elementary, "Enough Nemesis to Go Around": a witness and U.S. Marshall are killed in an elevator in mid-descent by bullets that could only have originated from inside the elevator, yet there were no other occupants and the elevator never stopped.
  • Other television series have contained locked-room episodes:

Pulp magazines

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. 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.

Comic books/graphic novels

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. 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 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, albeit a rather feeble one. One American comic book series that made good use of locked-room mysteries is Mike W. Barr's Maze Agency.

French-speaking culture has long respected the comic book as a form of art in its own right; consequently, there many French comic books feature impossible crimes. The popular Belgian comic book hero Tintin tackled a locked-room mystery in Le Sceptre d'Ottokar. The many adventures of the journalist Ric Hochet are replete with impossible crimes, for example: L'Assassin Fantome, Les Spectres de la Nuit, and La Nuit des Vampires.

Manga also has its locked-room adherents, such as the series Detective Conan written by Gosho Aoyama; notable locked-room issues are #3, #6, #7. A similar series, Kindaichi Case Files, features a locked-room mystery in almost every story. Many of these are original, ingenious, and meticulously explained; early examples are The Opera House Murders, Death TV and Smoke and Mirrors Finally, the series Q.E.D. features many original locked-room mystery as well.

Graphic novels also locked-room mysteries as a motif. For example, the series Umineko no Naku Koro ni by 07th Expansion has used the locked-room mystery as the basis of the novel and denies any possible answer the player comes to during the novel.

True crimes

  • George Colvocoresses, captain of the USS Saratoga during the American Civil War, was, according to his biography, mysteriously murdered in Bridgeport, Connecticut on June 3, 1872, while on his way to New York. According to his great-great-granddaughter, however, his insurers later alleged that his death was a suicide, as the bullet wound he suffered was conveyed at close range through his heart, without the bullet's penetrating of his outer garments. It remains unexplained why, if this were the case, he would choose the busiest time of day on a busy street, nor why his shirt remained tucked in his trousers after death.[3]
  • 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 no 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. On the floor lay Fink with two bullet wounds in his chest and one in his left wrist, which was powder-marked. He was dead. There was money in his pockets, and the cash register had not been touched. No weapon was found. The man had died instantly, or almost instantly.[citation needed] There was a theory that the murderer had crawled through the transom, but to do so he would have had to be no bigger than a small boy and would have had to leave the same way, as the door was bolted. Another theory had the murderer firing through the transom, but Fink's wrist was powder-burned, indicating that he had not been fired at from a distance. More than two years later, Police Commissioner Mulrooney, in a radio talk, called this murder in a closed room an "insoluble mystery".[4] The crime was said to have inspired William March's The Bird House and Ben Hecht's The Mystery of the Fabulous Laundryman.
  • 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 at both stations swore nobody was seen getting in or out of the compartment, and witnesses in both adjacent compartments swore that nobody had tried to enter the one where Mlle. Toureaux's body was found. The murderer had one minute and twenty seconds at his or her disposal. Neither the murderer nor the method of his or her escape was ever discovered.[5]

References

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Further reading

  • "The Locked Room". Donald E. Westlake. Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories. Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Chapters 19,20,22. John T. Irwin. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. JHU Press, 1996. 482 pages.
  • Crime Fiction by John Scaggs. Routledge, 2005. 184 pages.
  • Michael Cook. Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction: The Locked Room Mystery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 210 pages.

External links

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