by Miles Jupp
BBC

(Spoiler
alert: Key plot details revealed below)

Locked room
mysteries – featuring seemingly impossible murders – have intrigued
crime fans since the golden age of detective fiction. What’s their
appeal, and how many ingenious solutions can writers devise, asks
Miles Jupp.

Four walls,
a door, a ceiling and floor.

As crime scenes
go, it doesn’t seem particularly promising. Yet for over a century,
some of the most ingenious detective writers in the world have been
wringing suspense and excitement from locked room murders.

Last month,
I found myself locked in a freezing cell in the Tower of London.

With me was
Paul Doherty, a history mystery writer, who detailed the myriad
ways in which he could easily kill me in just such an environment,
with disconcerting relish.

Doherty, who
has written more than 90 novels, calmly ran through a long list
of macabre possibilities of how one might be done away with –
by means of snakes or poison or even felled by arrows fired in through
a slit.

The locked
room genre is littered with examples of seemingly impossible murders.
Perhaps a bloodied corpse is found in a room which had been locked
for months. Or a victim, paranoid for his safely, concealed alone
in a bank vault, is murdered nonetheless.

As crime novels
go, such stories are a world away from contemporary, grimy police
procedurals or Ruth Rendell-style tales of psychopaths and loners.
Locked room murder mysteries do not aim to shine a light on the
darker and more brutal realities of our existence. Each one is a
puzzle.

This is a world
in which detectives, often posh or whimsical, grapple to solve crimes
that should not have been achievable in the first place.

Writers of
locked room mysteries are not interested in the psychology of the
killer, or the drink problem of the detective. What fascinates them
is the thrill of setting up a fiendish crime, and challenging the
reader to solve it.

Mild-mannered
Robert Adey has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the locked room murder
genre. In his
1991 bibliography he lists more than 2,000 of them, and at home
has a bulging file bringing his research up to date.

Within the
covers of his innocent-looking book is a resource that could launch
the career of any would-be crime novelist, or indeed serial killer.
The volume contains page after page describing bodies found dead
in castles, lighthouses, submarines and deserted houses.

What they have
in common is that their being killed should have been inconceivable.
And yet they are all stone dead. (Apart from a very few who were
pretending in order that they might fool a detective or be switched
at the last minute for the body of their identical twin brother.
Or a waxwork – over the years these writers have tried almost everything.)

But if the
list of puzzles at the front of the book are intriguing, it is at
the back of Adey’s book where things get even more interesting.
Here one can peruse the solutions to these crimes which have bamboozled
the most wily of readers and tested the powers of the most perceptive
of detectives.

Within this
list of solutions can be found bats who dislodge ceremonial daggers
so that they plunge into the heart of the victim, or vicious cats
whose claws have been dipped in poison, sliding doors, hidden panels
and gas-filled glass vials crushed under heel. Each one reveals
something of the extraordinary ingenuity of writers of locked room
mysteries.

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the rest of the article

May
26, 2012

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© 2012 BBC