Locked Room Mysteries in Fiction

The death-causing method is ingenious. A lesson in applied science. It is such a fascinating method that the basic idea has subsequently been copied by other authors.

Two former friends, who had a falling out and now hate each other, meet in a Turkish bath. A verbal altercation ensues. One exits and goes to the shampoo room and the other is found dead. No weapon is found and the possibility to smuggle in and out a weapon has been ruled out by the available evidence. The living man, the apparent criminal, is charged with murder and it takes the genius of the victim's daughter to prove him...

Strange deaths have occurred at the Castle Inn. In total three unexplained fatalities. The last death was the one of Archibald Wentworth. The well-to-do sleuth John Bell is investigating. Despite being strongly discouraged, Bell sleeps in the haunted chamber and thereby solves the supernatural mystery and explains it with science and common sense.

1st edition 1898, PDF 17 pages.

Engineers will like the resolution of this locked room mystery. Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, a former medical doctor who became a forensic investigator of crimes, has to deal with murder behind locked doors. The only clue he has is an aluminum dagger shoved into the back of the victim.

One of the unique aspects of detective stories by R. Austin Freeman is that Freeman personally tested the methods described in his stories. The top floor of his house was a workshop and laboratory where he could try out and investigate sometimes arcane scientific knowledge from areas such as tropical medicine,...

The word 'special' in the title refers to a special train - a privately hired train. This is a train a railway company inserts into its regular schedule when somebody pays for the expenses of the locomotive, wagons, and staff to operate the train. It is essentially the equivalent of chartering an airplane at a time when there were no airplanes.

This impossible crime story concerns the baffling disappearance of a special from the London and West Coast Railway Company on its journey from Liverpool to London on 3rd June 1890. Besides the train crew of driver, fireman, and train guard the only...

... and four other Magnum, the science consultant, detective stories.

Each story has a scientific bend or aspect to it. Magnum is not the typical detective who takes on any interesting case. He only engages when there seems to be a scientific aspect to the case. He doesn't involve himself with the law or right or wrong. His primary interest is to figure out the modus operandi as a scientific consultant. Superbly eccentric, Magnum lives up the Thames at Plumstead Marshes and travels to his laboratories via a high-powered motor launch named "Fifi". He has a brilliant but intensely shy assistant,...

Based on actual crimes and mysteries investigated at Scotland Yard.

This is a fun read if you like short problems of deduction and observation. While most of them are not locked room problems, there are two of them in this collection, #34 and #88. One of them states that on an express train, a girl was found dead in a third-class compartment. Her head was badly injured. A violent blow had caused her death. The train had not stopped during the journey and the girl had occupied the compartment alone all the way.

Magicians will be able to solve some of the mysteries more easily because they...

The crime: The Home Secretary Sir James Watson was found shot in the head inside his study which was locked from the inside. There was no apparent way in or out for the murderer to have been able to get into the room to commit the crime, nor a way to escape unnoticed. Further, the housekeeper Mrs. Simmons did not hear any shot which she certainly would have. What is going on here? How was the crime committed and by who?

It will be the task of Superintendent Sinclair from Scotland Yard and his amateur sleuth friend Sylvester Collins, a barrister, to unravel the mystery.

The inside cover...

An obscure masterpiece in the world of locked room mysteries with a meticulously planned-out crime that will delight the discerning detective story fan.

The original inside flap advert reads:

Plot: While Holmes escapes boredom to a cocaine-induced haze sitting in his apartment on Baker Street, a beautiful but distressed young woman, Mary Morstan, asks for the help of Holmes and Watson. Her father vanished ten years ago. Starting six years ago she received every year from an anonymous benefactor a large precious pearl, totaling six pearls today. Now she received an invitation to meet the anonymous sender of pearls. It is an intriguing case that Holmes and Watson happily accept...

The most exciting scene of the novel is what could be called a 19th-century version of a high-speed...

Just before Helen Stoner's twin sister Julia was about to get married she was murdered during the night in her own chambers which she habitually locked from inside before going to bed. Now Helen was recently engaged and she, too, fears that she may be about to be killed. Ms. Stoner is living with her stepfather Dr. Roylotts of Stoke Moran in the old half-abandoned ancestral country house. Watson and Holmes investigate ...

Arthur Conan Doyle considered this his best story. It is a classic locked room mystery with a clever method. It has been adapted for television, film, theatre, radio,...

This is the continuation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room with many of the main characters reappearing. The setting is even more fascinating in an old castle called The Fort of Hercules. Again we get a detailed map of the castle where the strange happenings occur to help us visualize the setting and situation. The novel explains and resolves some of the connections between the various characters leading to a stunning revelation.

• CHAPTER I: Which Begins Where Most Romances End
• CHAPTER II: In Which There Is Question Of The Changing Humors Of Joseph Rouletabille
• CHAPTER III: The Perfume
• CHAPTER IV: En Route; the Little...

From the author of the famous The Phantom of the Opera comes this detective story. While this is not the first locked room mystery, it is the first such novel that features a detailed floorplan illustrating the crime scene. This provides an additional layer of information for the reader to follow along and try to solve the mystery.

The protagonist is the amateur sleuth and reporter Joseph Rouletabille who is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. (This is the successful detective fiction template created...

The premise of this locked-room story is wonderful. The protagonist is Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen who is in a scientific debate with Dr. Charles Ransom and Alfred Fielding. Augustus, also known as "The Thinking Machine", claims that nothing is impossible when logic and clear thinking are applied. To prove his point, they conduct an experiment where Van Dusen is locked up in a prison for one week with the challenge to escape, which of course he does. But the real fun is in how he does it. It is a tour de force of logic and deductive thinking. Highly recommended to all locked room crime lovers. ...

Arthur Conan Doyle was the most famous and successful author in the detective story genre. One of the locked-room mysteries he wrote was The Adventure of the Empty House. The story plays in 1894, three years after Holmes's apparent death. Ronald Adair, son of the Earl of Maynooth, a colonial governor in Australia, was killed with a soft-nosed revolver bullet to his head while sitting in his room, working on accounts of some kind. The motive was not robbery since nothing was stolen. Adair's door was locked from the inside and the only window in the room presented a 20-foot drop with no sign...

The Big Bow Mystery was one of the first locked-room mystery stories and the first full-length locked-room mystery. It is still one of the best with an ingenious solution. It has been used as the basis for three movies (The Perfect Crime (1928), The Crime Doctor (1934), The Verdict (1946)).

Set in London's East End, in Bow, a murder occurred inside a locked room, with no clear indication as to the weapon used, the perpetrator of the crime, or a possible escape route. Mrs. Drabdump, a widow who rents out rooms, panics when one of her lodgers does not respond to her attempts to wake him....

With Murders in the Rue Morge, Edgar Allan Poe is the inventor of the model for the modern detective story consisting of a brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as the narrator, and the revelation of whodunit that is revealed before the explanation of how the crime was committed. More specifically, Poe is also the father of the locked room mystery, detective stories where the impossibility of the crime takes center stage. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged that he modeled his most famous Sherlock Holmes stories after Poe's detective story model by having Watson explicitly state in the first Holmes...