"It's hard to believe now that I ever thought a locked room could be a place of safety, what with the snakes, the daggers made of ice, the invisible ethers, or unseen electrical currents. A sealed room with four walls, a ceiling and a floor could be the place you meet your end..."- Miles Jupp
I've passed
the halfway mark in the Herculean task of reading The Black Lizard Big Book
of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), edited by Otto
Penzler, which is partially due to ignoring the stories I had read before
and there were quite a few of those!
Thankfully,
the fifth column of stories, How Easily is Murder Discovered, in which "there
are so many ways for the creative killer to accomplish the act," were
really good. I've even re-read two of the stories to see if they held up and
they did.
"The Burglar
Who Smelled Smoke," by Lawrence Block
and Lynne Wood Block, was first published in the Summer/Fall 1997 issue of Mary
Higgins Clark's Mystery Magazine and stars Lawrence Block's
series-character, Bernie Rhodenbarr – a secondhand bookshop owner and part-time
burglar. Rhodenbarr is dropping in on an avaricious collector of mysteries to
unload a rare edition of Rex
Stout's first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934), which has been
inscribed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the collector is found dead
before the transaction can be completed. Of course, it happened in a library
designed as an impenetrable, fireproof strong room with steel-lined walls and
bullet resistant windows to keep the valuable collection as safe as if they
were stored in a nuclear bunker. The solution opposing this problem is
delightfully simple and more than stood up to re-reading. I think this was the
story that put Rex Stout on my radar.
I can also
heartily recommend Block's The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994),
in which Rhodenbarr stumbles across a body in a locked bathroom during a
burglary, but the entire story was a joy to read. It's another one of those
series I should return to.
"The Kestar
Diamond Case" by Augustus Muir
was first published in Raphael, M.D. (1935) and I assume this is the
first recorded case of Dr. Louis Raphael, who can be described as a peculiar
cross between Dr. John Thorndyke and Hercule Poirot. I assume from the
character introductions this is the first (recorded) case in the series and the
first problem for the doctor arose during the robbery of a diamond merchant. A
precious stone was lifted from a locked office room, guarded by a
plainclothesman, while the only occupant of the office was the loyal, but dead,
clerk of the firm. The robbery is set against the backdrop of an underworld
rivalry between the Lucian gang and a clever jewel thief, known only as "The Baron," but the doctor's approach is that of calm, reasonable scientist –
taking a blood-film of the victim and laying a trap in his laboratory. Not from
the top drawer, but still a fun, old-fashioned crime story and glad to have had
an opportunity to sample something from an obscure mystery writer like Muir.
"The Odour of
Sanctity" by Kate Ellis was
originally written for The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and
Impossible Crimes (2000) and one of the two stories I re-read, in which a
man is seen falling from a window of a locked tower room – to which the only
key was in his possession. It becomes even more complicated when it's
discovered that the man was stabbed and had been dead long before the fall. The
trick to the locked tower room was more involved than I remembered, but it was
nonetheless nice to see a modern crime writer successfully taking a swing at
the sealed room.
"The Invisible
Weapon" by Nicholas Olde
was first published in The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern (1928)
and it's a short-short story with Chestertonian tendencies, but that's an
observation that has been made before. The gimmick Olde employed for the murder
in the locked and watched ballroom of a castle has passed from a cliché into a
joke, but that didn't diminished the quaint charm of the overall story.
Ray Cummings' "The Confession of Rosa Vitelli" was first published in the August 19, 1925
issue of The Sketch and features the Scientific Crime Club, whom came
across to me as the precursors of Isaac
Asimov's The Black Widowers – except where these guys far more involved.
The problem they're dissecting is the inexplicable confession by Rosa Vitalli
to the murder of her roommate, Angelina, but refuses to tell how she managed to
turn the gas on-and off in their flat – while all the windows, the door and
transom were closed from the inside. However, the main draw of the story is not
the locked room, but the miracle the Scientific Crime Club perform to make Rosa
tell the truth. The playful ideas about time and space. How it can be captured.
And that great question: "Where does light go when it goes out?" It
showed Cummings was a SciFi-writer and it may have diluted the
detective-elements of the story, but I couldn't help but like the story.
"The Locked
Room to End Locked Rooms" by Stephen Barr was first published in the August
1965 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted as "The Locked
House" in Best Detective Stories of the Year (1966), but I prefer the
title the story was reprinted under here – because it makes a good attempt to
keep that promise. The story begins with a discussion about detective fiction
and locked room mysteries at one the smallest, but most argumentative, clubs in
London, The Regent's, and one point of contention is how locked room mysteries
are seldom mysteries. Well, one of the members has an example of a genuine
locked room murder without a discernible trace of the perpetrator left on the
scene of the crime. The victim is an explorer, Petrus Dander, with ties to the
British government and was brutally murdered at his home, which forced White
Hall to start covering various tracks to prevent an embarrassing scandal. These
include how an axe-wielding killer was able to decapitate Dander and than apparently
disappear in a puff of smoke. I've seen a variation on this trick before in a
detective series from decades later, but it's still a pretty clever method to
escape from a completely sealed premise. Still not sure if this story can be
regarded as the ultimate locked mystery, but the attempt has been duly noted.
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