Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries

The appeal of the locked room mystery is simple and obvoius. As Isaac Asimov says in his introduction, No One Done It: “Somewhere, however impossible the crime seems to be, there must be an answer that involves only logic and the real world. That is the faith of the mystery aficionado. The delight is in finding the solution and the justification of that faith.”

The twelve stories in this carefully-assembled collection reflect the history of the locked room mystery story. Beginning with the grandfather of the genre, Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic, The Adventure of the Speckled Band featuring the great Sherlock Holmes, the reader will move on into the twentieth century, and be entertained by such modern masters as MacKinlay Kantor and Erle Stanley Gardner.

The stories demonstrate the remarkable variety of the locked room puzzle: the scene of these impossible crimes might be a log cabin in the mountains, and it might be a big-city automat. The characters range from telephone operators to scientists to mystery writers themselves. Jack Wodham’s Big Time Operator centers around a machine that allows people to travel in time; and Vanishing Act, by contemporary writers Bill Pronzini and Michael Kurland, involves a magician whose astonishing feats may be more than just mere illusion.

Here then are a dozen choice morsels, selected by three of the top names in crime fiction [sic!], to challenge, entice, frustrate—and tantalize.

Three old standbys are included in this book:

Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841),
Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892),
Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905).
and:
"The 51st Sealed Room; or The MWA Murder" (1951) by Robert Arthur
"The Exact Opposite" (1951) by Erle Stanley Gardner
"The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) by Edward D. Hoch
"The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930) by McKinley Kantor
"Vanishing Act" (1975) by Bill Pronzini and Michael Kurland
"Big Time Operator" (1970) by Jack Wodhams
"Murder at the Automat" (1937) by Cornell Woolrich