The Locked Room Genre

---Additional Insights & Trivia

The Three Coffins

The Three Coffins, by John Dickson Carr, has been rated as the best (in a poll) in the genre. A quick summary:

Professor Grimaud is in his study, fearing a visit from his brother, whom he had wronged terribly many years previously. Anticipating trouble, he instructs several members of his staff to take up positions near the study, ready to step in if their is trouble. His brother, going under the name Pierre Fley, comes to the house. He is shown to the study, where he is seen exchanging a few words with Grimaud. Fley enters the study and the door is bolted from the inside. Moments later sounds of a struggle are heard from inside the room. There is a gunshot. The door is broken down. Grimaud is found on the floor, shot point-blank. He is not yet dead, but is clearly fading fast. The window in the room is opened, but there is undisturbed snow on the ledge, ruling it out as a means of escape. The snow several stories below is entirely undisturbed, as is the snow on the roof of the building above. There is a fireplace in the room, but the chimney is far too small for a person to have climbed out.

Grimaud is taken to the hospital, where he manages to utter a few words just before dying. The novel's first act ends with these words being transmitted from the hospital back to the police, who are still investigating at Grimaud's house:

He was conscious just before the end. He said certain things which can be attested by two of my nurses and myself; but he might have been wandering and I should be careful of them. I knew him pretty well, but I certainly never knew he had a brother.

First he said he wished to tell me about it; then he spoke exactly as follows:

It was my brother who did it. I never thought he would shoot. God knows how he got out of that room! One second he was there, and the next he wasn't. Get a pencil and paper, quick! I want to tell you who my brother is, so that you won't think I'm raving.

His shouting brought in the final hemorrhage, and he died without saying anything else. I am holding the body subject to your orders.

E. H. Peterson, M.D.

They all looked at each other. The puzzle stood rounded and complete; the facts stood confirmed and the witnesses vindicated; but the terror of the hollow man remained. After a pause the superintendent spoke in a heavy voice. “God knows,” repeated Hadley, “how he got out of that room.”

The novel's second act has the police going to Pierre Fley's apartment. They find him dead in the middle of a snow-covered, dead-end street. Shot point blank, with no footprints but his own in the snow around him. The watchers at either end of the street heard the murderer say, “The second bullet is for you!” and heard the gunshot, but no one saw the crime committed. Various lines of evidence showed that this crime took place after the events in Grimaud's study, with the same murder weapon.

In addition to its other merits, The Three Coffins contains a chapter entitled “The Locked Room Lecture” in which the action is paused, and Carr's detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, discourses on the various methods by which a locked-room crime can be committed. It's an implicit challenge to the reader. The lecture is quite thorough, and really does cover everything, at least in terms of basic schemas.

Forms of the Impossible Crime

(and sample books of the type)

Rooms locked from the inside (or under constant observation)

Edgar Allan Poe --Murders in the Rue Morgue

J.D.Carr --The Cavalier's Cup, Till Death Do Us Part, The Dead Man's Knock

Ellery Queen --TheChinese Orange Mystery

Edgar Wallace --TheClue of the New Pin.

Israel Zangwill --Big Bow Mystery (1895); is one of the first locked-room novels that really 'works' and used the 'impossibility' as a critical plot element, not just a diversion.

Carr's own favorite impossible crime story was Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). The plot is ingenious. The impossibility involves witnesses observing the only doorway the murderer could have used, and of course no one was seen entering; Carr used this device in It Walks by Night and (a variation of the theme, where the murderer is seen entering the room but vanishes from it) in The Three Coffins, to cite just two examples.

Secret Passages and Hidden Traps

Secret entrances or other hidden accesses (usually considered cheating in this category) were rarely used by Carr, but when he did (The Judas Window), he surpassed himself.

Booby-trap stories are mostly unconvincing because too much of the success of the device depends on pure luck (most writers who used these ploys never considered Murphy's Law that if anything can go wrong it will).

Magician's Tricks

In many cases (especially with Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini stories and Joseph Commings tales about Senator Brooks Banner), the impossible crime situation is created by use of professional magic -- mirrors, misdirection, and the like. One trouble with this approach is that it is rarely convincing. There is not much to be said about this form of locked-room murder, as there are very few examples. But once again, The Three Coffins has to be mentioned.

'No Footprints in the Snow'

Another type of impossible crime is the 'killer left no footprints' situation -- where the victim is found stabbed or strangled in a place where access by the murderer had to have left traces: a field of snow, a beach of wet sand, a stretch of mud, etc. Carr used this a lot (Witch of the Low Tide, White Priory Murders, Problem of the Wire Cage, and so on).

All in all, however, the no-footprints puzzle provides one of the best impossible crime situations.

The Impossible Suspect

The reader (and the detective) know or suspect who the murderer is, but all indications are that he couldn't have done it anyway, or he has an apparently unassailable alibi. Carr handled this well in To Wake the Dead or Hag's Nook, for example. Rex Stout's League of Frightened Men is a classic of this sort. The hidden serial killer (a pillar of the community) is a subset of this category (Carter Dickson's My Late Wives, Night at the Mocking Widow, etc.). One of the best multiple-murder mysteries is Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails; Agatha Christie did several good ones as well (esp. The Pale Horse, And Then There Were None, and The ABC Murders). A major aspect of this sort of plot is misdirection of the sort G. K. Chesterton specialized in -- that is, natural assumptions based on the reader's preconceptions, and abetted by the author's narrative slant, lead one to ignore what seems obvious in retrospect.

Several Impossible Crimes mixed together

Likewise, with books containing more than one impossible crime, each of a different type (Case of the Constant Suicides, He Who Whispers, The Burning Court, and, of course, The Three Coffins), only Carr was consistently successful

The Extravaganza

Another category worth mentioning is the Grand Rigmarole, where the impossible situations, bizarre events, and wild characters are piled one on top of the other, and the story never stops moving, twisting, and turning.For example, The Arabian Nights Murder or The Blind Barber, among Carr's works, or Carter Dickson's Punch and Judy Murders. The Devil in Velvet, one of Carr's historical fantasies, has most of everything you could ever want in it, including impossibilities and even Satan himself; masterpiece! Fire, Burn! and The Burning Court also weave in the supernatural/science fiction very successfully.

Remarks: Many of the books cited, above, are those of John Dickson Carr (or Carter Dickson). The reason is quite simple: he was the exemplar of this form of plot. A panel of writers, editors, critics and fans were asked in 1980 to name the best locked-room stories. Four of the best ten were by Carr, and The Hollow Man got almost double the votes of any other book. The three other Carr-Dickson novels in the first ten were The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Judas Window (1938), and The Ten Teacups(in America The Peacock Feather Murders--1937).

One of my favourite (the ultimate!) impossible crime story: The Lamp of Godby Ellery Queen –an entire house vanishes!! A typical Ellery Queen trick.

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The following are some examples of "impossible" or "locked-room" 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 daughteris found strangled and stuffed into a chimney. ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
  • 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 (U.S. title: The Three Coffins), a novel by John Dickson Carr)
  • 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 (90m) away swear they saw nobody approach the rock for hours. (Have His Carcase, a novel by Dorothy L. Sayers)
  • A man is seen committing a crime by several witnesses, and is found dead later. Examination of the body indicates he was already dead before the crime was committed. ("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. 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, a novel by John Dickson Carr)
  • A man is shot and disfigured beyond recognition with a sawed-off shotgun in an impregnable castle, to which the only entrance is sealed. (Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, the third novel featuring Sherlock Holmes. Other Holmes "Locked Room" mysteries are "The Adventure of the Speckled Band";"The Adventure of the Crooked Man"; "The Adventure of the Resident Patient")
  • The murderer is seen entering a room by a witness, but when the room is opened only the corpse of the victim is to be found. (The Hollow Man)
  • 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)
  • Two people are found shot to death at point-blank range inside a room locked on the inside. No gun is found in the room, and no bullets are found in either body. See the True Crime section.
  • The killer rents an apartment beneath the victim, opens a box with radioactive materials and leaves. After the death of the victim in the overhead apartment, the killer returns and departs with the box. (Kill-Box by Lawrence Lariar under the pseudonym Michael Stark)