A locked room gathers many corpses. But HOW??
Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie’s most revered books for a reason. She uses the trope of the locked room mystery as a foundation and then further heightens the “impossible” crime by situating that locked room on a moving train. If that’s not enough reinventing of the old mystery wheel for one day, her solution is also a bit of a game-changer, but I’ll not say too much about that here!
I will, however, offer some suggestions for readers looking for locked room mysteries that are a bit off the beaten path. During the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, locked room stories were very popular, and those of you who are interested in classic examples of the genre should have no trouble finding print anthologies or online archives to explore. But i’m drawn to the “yes, and…” approach to writing, with conventions given a little twist, genres blended, those unexpected tweaks that make a book memorable. So, while these books all feature locked rooms of one sort or another, there’s an extra bit swirled into them that makes them stand apart from the crowd.
Happy sleuthing!
This homage to Agatha Christie blends elements from two of her most celebrated novels: And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express, as a murder investigation aboard a British steamship bound for Calcutta is complicated by the (charmingly eccentric) suspects being murdered, one by one, to the consternation of Police commissioner Gauche.
A locked room mystery in spaaaaaaaace! A character-driven sci-fi/mystery blend in which the clones of a murdered starship crew “awaken” with no memories of how they died. Now, trapped on a spaceship floating through the galaxy, they must figure out who among them is the killer before they get murdered. Again.
1936, Tokyo: The would-be murderer of seven women is himself found murdered in a locked room, just before his intended victims are killed precisely as he had plotted. Forty years later, the crimes are still unsolved, two amateur detectives set themselves to the task, and in a few instances of authorial intrusion, Soji Shimada encourages the reader (that’s YOU!) to try to beat them to it.
Sometimes called “America’s Agatha Christie,” Mignon Eberhart’s writing career spanned 60 years, with about as many books to her name, yet she has been largely forgotten. Right history’s wrongs by reading this book, in which a group of people become snowed in at a hunting lodge after being strategically gathered by their hostess for reasons which will become clear around the same time as the bodies start dropping.
DI Sean Duffy tackles the second locked-room murder of his career after nearly dismissing it as a suicide on the grounds that encountering two such cases would be statistically unlikely, although they occur with some regularity to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. His investigation (metaphorically) busts the locked room wide open, exposing a web of corruption, conspiracy, and criminal activity on an international scale.
Set in 2037, this is a near-future dystopian variant of a locked-room mystery tucked inside a high stakes competition designed to recruit candidates into a top secret intelligence agency. Elements of disparate genres—action/espionage, psychological suspense, and political thrillers take the classic locked-room scenario into brave new worlds.
Metafiction alert! A mystery novel about mystery novels, in which a member of a group of mystery buffs known as The Bloodhounds is found murdered in a locked houseboat after their discussion of the locked room tradition. This book is a guided tour through its own genre, paying tribute to its predecessors as characters namedrop authors, novels, and all the tricks of the locked-room trade on the way to solving the case.
In this first-in-series Victorian, mystery and magic are more compatible than the men assigned to investigate a locked room murder with occult overtones. When a violinist is found behind a locked door missing several organs with details suggesting supernatural foul play, two detectives are sent to the scene; a pragmatic Englishman and a superstitious Scot. They will disagree. There will be more bodies and fewer organs.
Translated from the Japanese, here a famous writer is found murdered in the locked room of a locked house, whose closest friend turns out to be an enemy with a long memory. The twist is that unlike most locked-room puzzles, this is less about the “who” or the “how” and more about the “why,” and the “investigation” is simply a conversation between the killer and the detective, full of red herrings and misdirection.
The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries
If those nine books aren’t enough to keep you busy, check out this 900-page anthology containing 68 short stories, from the very first mystery story ever; Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, through the work of Golden Age superstars like John Dickson Carr and Christie all the way up to contemporary authors like Stephen King.
Hopefully, you have found some of these suggestions intriguing, or have been inspired to (re)read Dame Christie’s oeuvre. And as always, feel free to drop your own suggestions into the mix—ten titles is far from an exhaustive list!
