The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

AFTERWORD

The impossible crime story has been around as long as the mystery story has existed. The gothic mystery, so popular in the late eighteenth century, abounded in stories of purportedly haunted rooms, though the solution usually related to a secret passage. Such was the case in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and even E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Mademoiselle de Scudari” (1819), even though the latter gives some pretext to being a genuine locked-room murder.

The first real locked-room mystery that did not rely on a secret passage – despite its title – was “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published in The Dublin University Magazine for November 1838. Le Fanu is best remembered today for his macabre novels like Uncle Silas (1864), which also includes a variant on his locked-room idea, and the vampire story “Carmilla” (1872). The only feature that Le Fanu’s story lacks is that of a detective intent on solving the mystery. That was soon provided by Edgar Allan Poe who, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841), provided the firm footing for the detective story. Needless to say Poe’s story is grotesque and bizarre, but it is a bona fide locked-room mystery.

A few other locked-room stories appeared during the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps the best known being “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (Household Words, 24 April 1852). The story was published by Charles Dickens, and I’m a little surprised that Dickens did not turn his hand to the impossible crime story as he would certainly have brought considerable ingenuity to it. By and large the mid-Victorian impossible crime story retains too many trappings of the gothic era and, though original at the time, today seem a little too trite. That’s the main reason I have not reprinted them – beyond the fact that most are easily available in the authors’ collected stories. The only one I have selected is from Out of His Head (1862) by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which is both original and feels far more modern than its contemporaries.

The real explosion in the impossible crime story came in 1892 as a result of two significant publications. The first was a novel, The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, serialized in the London evening paper The Star. This is the first full-length novel written solely round a murder in a locked room. Zangwill had thought about the problem for several years before he wrote the novel and his creativity and originality shows. Gone are the secret passages and other devices. Here was a novel where the crime had been committed with incredible ingenuity and had to be solved with equal skill and deduction. Needless to say during its serialization readers of The Star wrote in suggesting their own solutions – none of which was right – and the thrill and enticement of the locked-room mystery became only too evident.

The other publication was a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (The Strand Magazine, February 1892). The immediate success of the Holmes stories in The Strand is well known. Arthur Conan Doyle was fascinated with the idea of unusual crimes, and what makes the Holmes stories stand out is that all of the crimes are bizarre, a real test for Holmes’s deductive powers. Holmes had no interest in the run-of-the-mill crime. Perhaps, because of that, it is surprising that there are not more impossible crimes amongst the Holmes canon. Strictly there are only two, the other being “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (The Strand Magazine, February 1922) where a murder is committed but no visible weapon.

The Big Bow and “Speckled Band”, coming together just at the time when the popular fiction magazine was blossoming, opened the door for the impossible crime story. The late Victorian and Edwardian writers loved them. Conan Doyle wrote one further example, “The Story of the Lost Special” (The Strand Magazine, August 1898) where a train vanishes from a stretch of rail. L.T. Meade produced ever more bizarre solutions to her crimes, especially those collected in A Master of Mysteries (1898).

The next major breakthrough, however, came in 1905. In America the author Jacques Futrelle published “The Problem of Cell 13” as a serial in The Boston American (30 October – 5 November 1905), challenging the newspaper’s readers to solve the story. It introduced Futrelle’s character Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, known as the Thinking Machine, who has such a power of deduction that he is able to resolve any problem, no matter how impossible it seems. In this first story he set himself the challenge of escaping from a locked cell in a high-security prison, kept constantly under watch. How he did it remains one of the most remarkable stories ever written. Over the next six years Futrelle wrote several dozen Thinking Machine stories, not all of which appeared in book-form. They included stories in which things disappear from guarded rooms, a car vanishes from a stretch of road, and even an entire house disappears. It was such a tragedy that Futrelle was killed when the Titanic sank in 1912.

It was also in 1905 that Edgar Wallace published The Four Just Men, along with much publicity and gimmickry. Wallace had published the book himself and deliberately left the ending open, offering a prize to the reader who could solve the baffling murder of a man in broad daylight surrounded (but not touched) by policemen in a locked room. Needless to say the redoubtable Edgar Wallace employed the locked-room idea many times in his books and stories, with perhaps the most ingenious being in The Crimson Circle (1922), where a man is found gassed in a locked room.

Soon after The Four Just Men came one of the most popular of all locked-room mysteries, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). The author was Gaston Leroux, best known for The Phantom of the Opera (1911). The novel, which is still in print, is one of the best developed of all locked-room deaths, and is all the more fun because of the rivalry between the detective, Frederick Larson, and the newspaper reporter, Joseph Rouletabille, to solve the crime.

If the impossible crime story needed any final seal of approval it came in 1911 with the publication of The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton. The stories had already caused a sensation in The Story-Teller, where they had started to appear from the September 1910 issue. The editor of The Story-Teller, Arthur Spurgeon, was so impressed by the stories that he announced them with the proclamation that: “the plots are so amazing and so cleverly worked out that I believe they will prove to be the best detective stories of our time.” There were in total five volumes of Father Brown stories, many of them falling into the category of the impossible crime, especially those in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926).

By another remarkable instance of synchronicity, at the same time as Father Brown appeared so did Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner. Although the first collection, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, did not appear until 1918, the stories were being run in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines from 1911 on. Alas, all too few of them are miracle murders, though the best, “The Doomdorf Mystery”, which David Renwick refers to and which is reprinted in this anthology, most certainly was.

Chesterton and Post provide the link across the Great War and into the 1920s. There were less impossible crime stories written during this period than one might expect, though the form was well enough established for P.G. Wodehouse to spoof it in the perfectly acceptable “The Education of Detective Oakes” (Pearson’s Magazine, December 1914), where a man in a locked room appears to have been killed by snake venom.

S.S. van Dine, the creator of Philo Vance, gave it a good stab in The Canary Murder Case (1927) and later novels. Agatha Christie also turned her mercurial mind to the matter. Several of the stories in The Thirteen Problems (1932), such as “The Blue Geranium” (The Story-Teller, December 1929) are seemingly impossible crimes which Miss Marple is able to solve simply by applying her mind.

It was now, though, that the real doyen of the impossible crime story emerged onto the scene – John Dickson Carr. Carr had started writing when he was at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, placing stories in the college magazine, The Haverfordian. His third story, “The Shadow of the Goat” (November-December 1926) was his first locked-room murder and also introduced his detective Henri Bencolin. It’s an ingenious crime involving both a disappearance from a locked room and a murder in a house both locked and guarded. Carr was perfecting his craft from an early age – he was only twenty when these appeared. A later Bencolin serial, “Grand Guignol” (The Haverfordian, March-April 1929) was expanded into Carr’s first novel, It Walks By Night (1930).

Over the next forty years Carr was to write over fifty novels featuring impossible crimes, plus numerous short stories. It is impossible to list them all here, but I must single out a few. Probably the classic of them all is The Hollow Man (1935), also published under the title The Three Coffins. When, in 1980, Edward Hoch conducted a poll amongst a panel of seventeen experts on mystery fiction, this novel came out head-and-shoulders above the rest. It involves two impossible murders – a death in a locked and guarded room and a death in a snow-covered street with no footprints. The book features Carr’s best known detective, Dr Gideon Fell, and is notorious for the fact that Carr stops the action at a crucial point to allow Fell to deliver a lecture about the locked-room crime and the various ways in which it can be achieved. The book – and the lecture – remain models of their kind.

There were three other Carr novels in the experts’ top ten. The Crooked Hinge (1938), another Gideon Fell novel, came in fourth. This provides a slightly less satisfying but nevertheless intriguing solution to a murder in the sand with none but the victim’s footprints. The Judas Window (1938), published under his Carter Dickson alias, and mentioned by David Renwick in his Foreword, was voted fifth. I personally rate this as Carr’s best constructed novel – ingenious, surprisingly plausible, and riveting. It features Carr’s detective Henry Merrivale, as does The Ten Teacups (1937), also known as The Peacock Feather Murders, and tenth on the experts’ list. In fact the Henry Merrivale mysteries include some of the most unusual impossible murders such as those in The Plague Court Murders (1934), The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Red Widow Murders (1935).

Carr also used the impossible crime idea in many short stories. Some of the best are found in the collection The Department of Queer Complaints (1940) featuring a new detective, Colonel March. It is one of the those stories, “The Silver Curtain”, that I have reprinted here. Perhaps one of the best examples of misdirection in misleading the reader arises in the novella The Third Bullet (1937) in which three bullets are fired in a locked room, each from a different gun, and yet the only other person in the room did not have the murder weapon.

You would think that with the amount of books Carr produced, and with his profundity of ideas, no one else would attempt an impossible crime story in his shadow. But the reverse happened. Rather than cornering the market, Carr stimulated it. The 1930s was a golden era for the miracle crime. Ellery Queen, which was both the name of the detective and of the authors (the pseudonym adopted by cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) produced two remarkable locked-room mysteries: The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and The Door Between (1937). The magician Clayton Rawson, creator of the character The Great Merlini, specialized in impossible crimes and produced some of the best, starting with Death From a Top Hat (1938) in which a whole bunch of magicians are involved. His other novels are The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940) – which involves an escape from an electrically controlled, double-locked room, and No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). Rawson, Dannay and Carr often used to challenge each other to come up with the most impossible situations for an impossible crime. On one occasion Carr challenged Rawson to explain how a man could enter a telephone booth and disappear. That story, “From Off the Face of the Earth”, is the one I’ve selected for this anthology.

Another of the Ellery Queen circle, Anthony Boucher, did not write anywhere near enough locked-room mysteries as he would have liked, though both Nine Times Nine (1940), as H.H. Holmes, and The Case of the Solid Key (1941) are competent and ingenious. For ingenuity, though, and barefaced bravado, it was difficult to beat the pseudonymous Hake Talbot. In the early 1940s he produced two novels on a par with the skilled plotting of Carr and the audaciousness of Rawson. Both The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and especially Rim of the Pit (1944) confuse the reader with all manner of apparent supernatural paraphernalia before the real solutions to the impossible murders are revealed. If I tell you that in one book a man is cursed and his body immediately decomposes, whilst in another an apparent, wind-walker (Wendigo) menaces a snowbound house, you’ll have some idea of the thrill of these novels. Professor Douglas Greene, a noted expert in the history of crime fiction, has called Rim of the Pit “one of the most extraordinary tales of mystery ever written.”

Ethel Lina White produced a minor masterpiece in The Wheel Spins (1936), in which a woman disappears from a moving train. The book is probably better remembered as the film The Lady Vanishes, made in 1938.

Unfairly forgotten today, though thankfully his works are gradually being rediscovered, is Clyde B. Clason who wrote a series of novels featuring the historian and amateur sleuth, Professor Theocritus Westborough. Seven of these novels feature impossible crimes of which the best is The Man From Tibet (1938) in which a man, locked inside a room full of Tibetan exhibits, apparently dies from a heart attack.

The British composer Bruce Montgomery also wrote mysteries as Edmund Crispin. He was the creator of the amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, who is an Oxford don and a literary critic. The first of his investigations, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), involved a murder in a room under constant observation. Perhaps his most audacious is The Moving Toyshop (1946), in which an entire shop disappears.

Author and lawyer Michael Gilbert who, amongst other things, was involved in drawing up the will of Raymond Chandler, began his writing career with an impossible murder, Close Quarters (1947), the first of his Inspector Hazelrigg novels. Soon after the brothers Peter and Antony Shaffer, writing as Peter Antony, produced a delightful locked-room mystery with The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). By and large, though, the locked-room mystery seemed to fall from favour in the fifties, and it only began to re-emerge in the sixties and seventies.

Much of the modern delight in the art can be ascribed to two writers – Bill Pronzini and Edward D. Hoch. Pronzini is a highly versatile writer producing novels and stories in several fields (science fiction, mystery fiction, westerns, horror) but he is probably best known for his books featuring the Nameless Detective. Several of these involve locked-room murders, starting with Hoodwink (1981), which won the Shamus Award of the Private Eye Writers of America. In fact it includes two locked-room murders, of which the victim killed by an axe in a locked shed has the most ingenious solution. Scattershot (1982) goes one better and has three impossible crimes – a stabbing in a locked car, a shooting in a cottage under observation and the theft of a ring from a guarded room!

Although Edward Hoch has written novels, he is the master of the short story, having written over 800 since his first in 1955; and a large number of these are impossible crimes. In fact he has written one long series devoted to nothing but impossible crimes. These are the stories narrated by his New England doctor, Sam Hawthorne, who reminisces back to his early days in the twenties and thirties, where an impossible crime seemed to happen three or four times a year! The series is still running in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM). The early stories have been collected as Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and I have reprinted a more recent one in this book.

However Hoch does not confine his impossible murders to just one series. He has several series on the go at once and a miracle crime is as likely to crop up in several of them. This happened from the start with his first series character Simon Ark. In “The Man From Nowhere” (Famous Detective Stories, June 1956) a man is found stabbed to death in the snow with no footprints around him. In the Inspector Rand story “The Spy Who Walked Through Walls” (EQMM, November 1966), top-secret blueprints disappear from a guarded office. There’s the Nick Velvet story, “The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” (EQMM, June 1975), where a man vanishes from a speeding car, even though his seat belt is still fastened! There’s the Captain Leopold story, “Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder” (EQMM, December 1976), where the man driving alone in the car in front in a traffic jam turns out to be strangled. The title of the Ben Snow story “The Vanished Steamboat” (EQMM, May 1984) tells it all. And then there’s the non-series story “The Impossible ‘Impossible Crime’” (EQMM, April 1968), where a man is shot in a snowbound hut, with no one else around for hundreds of miles except for one other who was asleep at the time. Hoch’s versatility seems boundless and I have no doubt he will create plenty more impossible crimes in the years to come.

In addition to Pronzini and Hoch there are plenty of writers prepared to turn a hand to the impossible crime. Michael Innes dabbled with it, with a murder in the library in Appleby and Honeybath (1983). Kate Wilhelm defied computer security for her suffocation in a lift and drowning in a Jacuzzi in Smart House (1989). Michael Dibdin pits Inspector Zen’s wits in Vendetta (1990) where a murder takes place in a high security fortress with video cameras everywhere. Whilst that doyen of the historical mystery, Paul Doherty, has shown the influence of John Dickson Carr in a number of his novels. There’s a murder in a locked church in Satan in St Mary’s (1986); a murder in full view of a crowd with no visible agency in The Angel of Death (1989); a murder in a locked room in the Tower of London in The White Rose Murders (1991) written as Michael Clynes; and the magnificent disappearance of an entire ship’s watch in By Murder’s Bright Light (1994), written as Paul Harding.

And we must not forget David Renwick’s “Jonathan Creek” who solves some of the most bizarre and idiosyncratic crimes on television.

There is no doubt that the future of the impossible crime story is in safe hands as I hope the stories in this anthology have shown. If this anthology has intrigued you I strongly urge you to seek out Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes by Robert Adey (Minneapolis’ Crossover Press, 1991), which is a remarkably detailed survey and bibliography of the field. You may also want to track down other anthologies, alas all out of print, but which give a flavouring of impossible crimes: The Locked Room Reader edited by Hans Stefan Santesson (New York: Random House, 1968); Tantalizing Locked Room Murders edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Walker, 1982); All But Impossible! edited by Edward D. Hoch (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1981); Locked Room Puzzles edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini (Chicago, Academy Chicago, 1986); Death Locked In edited by Douglas Greene and Robert Adey (IPL, 1987) and The Art of the Impossible edited by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey (London: Xanadu, 1990). I have tried to avoid duplicating too many stories from these books, although as they are all out of print, there are some gems that beg to be reprinted again. I hope your quest is not impossible.