There are now less than two weeks before the Early Bird discount on the purchase of tickets for the 2018 Bodies From The Library conference ends. Don’t delay and miss out on the reduced price. Tickets also make a super Christmas treat for the Golden Age Detective Fiction Fan in your life that they can look forward to long after the last mince pie has been digested and the last slice of turkey has been despatched.

It couldn’t be easier to take advantage of the offer while it still lasts. All you have to do is click on the Buy Tickets button next to this post.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
from
The Bodies From The Library Team

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is  eligible for its bus-pass as it is currently in its 65th year of its continuous run in the West End. Whether or not it should be pensioned off, as some unkind critics suggest, is a debate for another occasion but, I would argue strongly it is not the best Christie currently on the London stage. That honour I would unequivocally give to Witness for the Prosecution which is being staged in the old Council Chamber at London’s County Hall – the former seat of local government in the city.

This production, which has just been extended to run until September 2018, is a theatrical tour de force. The setting is redolent of the heated past debates which have taken place in the chamber and has been superbly transformed into the claustrophobic courtroom setting for the trial of Leonard Vole – played with appropriate mix of weakness and bravado by Jack McMullen. Catherine Steadman takes the eponymous role of Leonard’s wife Romaine and plays the audience with a powerful sense of drama through to the play’s shocking conclusion.

The experience was heightened for me by being Juror 12, and though I cannot give away the verdict (read out by Juror 1, another audience member, who stuck strictly to the script), it became clear that, for Christie, the barristers and judges in a courtroom are indeed very much like players in a theatrical production, addressing their pre-prepared lines to their audience – the jury – with every intention of swaying them emotionally to believe in their story, whether it be fact or fiction.

Even if you have seen the play before – or the excellent 1957 film (with Marlene Dietrich in the title role) – this production has tricks up its sleeve which make it, for me, a far better version than the recent TV adaptation and one that is much more true to the spirit of Christie.

I have been giving some thought to what Christmas presents to give to friends who are fans of Golden Age Detective Fiction. A big problem is trying to find something they haven’t already got on their bookshelves. With this in mind, here are the solutions I have come up with:

Fiction 

Foreign Bodies

A century before Scandi noir, writers across Europe and beyond were publishing detective stories of high quality. Often these did not appear in English and they have been known only by a small number of experts. These fascinating stories give an insight into the cosmopolitan cultures (and crime writing traditions) of diverse places including Mexico, France, Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Trent’s Last Case 

Called by Agatha Christie “one of the best detective stories ever written” and newly republished in hardback under Harper Collins Crime Club imprint (at a bargain price of £9.99).

Rogues’ Holiday

The first of the lost Margery Allingham thrillers written as serials under the pseudonym Maxwell March has now been republished by ipso Books. J K Rowling says “My favourite of the four Queens of Crime is Allingham.”

Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conumdrums

  
If you like your rooms locked and your crimes impossible then this collection of some of the finest (and least frequently reprinted) stories is for you. Its stories span the period from 440BC to 1918 and, best of all, it is abailable to download absolutely free. What is stopping you?

Non-fiction

Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks

A fascinating insight into the working methods of the most successful author of the Golden Age by arguably the leading authority on her works. It contains many revelations, not least the discarded endings from a number of her books, deleted scenes and even which famous Poirot novel started life as a Miss Marple adventure.

The Golden Age of Murder

Now out in paperback and updated this tells the history of the Detection Club and its members – the great writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. It won the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, H R F Keating and Oscar awards in the year of its first publication (ok, I lied about the Oscar).

No Spoilers!

Analyses Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple stories to reveal key differences in their solutions (without ever giving away whodunnit), examines trends in locked room mysteries and considers Golden Age Detective Fiction as popular culture giving insights into society and culture between the wars.

Sometimes you read a sentence which is so shocking that you just have to put the book down for a minute, take a deep breath and gather your thoughts before you can return to it and carry on. I had one such moment recently as I read Margery Allingham’s The Fashion In Shrouds. Published in 1938, it contained a sentence in which her hero, Albert Campion, who is neither a bounder nor a cad, expresses views about women which, quite simply, could not be expressed in writing today except by some desperately foul misogynist in certain vile corners of the internet. Yet the appearance of these views in what is quite definitely a work of mainstream popular fiction must, by the fact that they did appear without any significant public backlash, have been held without apology by a substantial part of the readership.

To compound the shock factor, the sentence is spoken by Campion to his sister Val:

“‘Oh,’ said Mr Campion furiously, ‘this is damned silly introspective rot. What you need, my girl, is a good cry or a nice rape – either I should think.’”

This is an acceptable perspective for a decent man to hold in 1930s Britain.
His sister does not express outrage at this suggestion but rebuffs it with a laugh, described as “Spiteful” saying:

“‘There’s a section of your generation who talks about rape as a cure for all ills, like old Aunt Beth used to talk about flannel next to the skin,’ she said witheringly. ‘This mania for sex-to-do-you-good is idiotic.”

She thinks his idea is old fashioned and stupidly wrong-headed but not fundamentally appalling as we would today. Indeed, both she and he regard rape as a sexual act whereas the prevailing view today is that rape is an act of violence and male dominance over females who are treated as subservient and objects to be possessed.

It may be worth noting that this exchange takes place in the context of a discussion on how Val responds on an emotional level to being dumped by the man she loves in which she says of her sex:

“We can’t…take the intelligent path except by a superhuman effort. Our feeling is twice as strong as our heads…We’re feminine, you fool!”

This is a leading woman author putting these words into the voice of a sympathetic female character who is a successful businesswoman.

The past is a very different place. Attitudes and ideas which would raise the hackles of any self-respecting 21st century feminist are accepted as gospel and go unchallenged in the 1930s. So that even if men thinking “a nice rape” (an oxymoron if ever there were one!!!) could be good for a woman are viewed as being somewhat behind the times they are not seen as outrageous and in need of a serious re-education about the reality of what rape is.

I happened to follow this book with Carter Dickson’s He Wouldn’t Kill Patience, published in 1944 and set in 1940 at the very beginning of the London blitz. In this popular and successful novel, the (male) author’s detective is a middle aged and rather pompous middle class male – Sir Henry Merrivale – who tells a younger man after he has an argument with a young woman that:

“‘If she starts raggin’ you, son, just wallop her one. That’s the way to treat wenches when they get out of hand.’”

Now, while it must be conceded that the younger man does not take up his mentor’s advice, which was given in front of the young woman in question, there is no response from either of the younger pair to indicate that they see anything fundamentally wrong with this suggestion. Clearly male violence towards women, and in particular what might now be termed domestic violence occurring within a supposedly loving relationship, is not viewed in the wholly unacceptable terms in which it is considered seventy years later.

However, it is evident from the texts that there are nuances and shades of meaning in the 1930s way of thinking which are now lost on the modern reader.
In The Fashion in Shrouds, Allingham has her character Amanda Fitton, who plays an intelligent female sidekick for her detective Campion in this novel, say of a male character:

“I thought the chap was close to being a bounder and he was certainly a dreadful old cad”.

Which made me pause to wonder what was the difference between a “bounder” and a “cad” such that one could certainly be the latter while only approaching being the former?

Modern dictionaries are no help. Indeed, they frequently define the one in terms of being the other.

“Bounder: a man who behaves badly or in a way that is not moral, especially in his relationships with women” (Cambridge)

“Bounder: a man whose behaviour is ungentlemanly; cad” (Collins)

“Bounder: a man of objectionable social behaviour; cad” (Merriam-Webster)

“Bounder n. British colloquial or jocular. An ill-bred or dishonourable person.” (Oxford Compact 1996)

“Bounder: a reprehensible person. Synonym – cad” (Thesaurus.com)

“Cad: a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another’s feelings or rights” (Merriam-Webster)

“Cad n a man who behaves dishonourably (abbreviation of caddie in an earlier sense ‘odd-job man’)” (Oxford Compact 1996)

“Cad: sly, dastardly person. Synonym – bounder” (Thesaurus.com)

“Cad: a rogue or bounder.” (Urban-dictionary)

Interestingly Roget’s Thesaurus lists the terms together under the theme of “Vulgarity”.

It seems that the insertion of a cigarette paper between the two terms is scarcely possible and seems to rely on the bounder’s ungentlemanly and dishonourable conduct being principally, though not exclusively, in relation to women whereas a cad appears to make no such gender distinction in the unfortunate victims of his selfish and dishonourable actions.

So perhaps Amanda was saying that the man in question was badly behaved towards everyone and that his behaviour towards women was not focussed but was part of a broader failure to conform to expected standards of conduct.

I’m glad we got that sorted out.

Because that means we can now turn to distinguishing a “cough drop” from a “bitch”. This stems from an exchange between Campion’s sister Val and Georgia, the woman who has “stolen” her boyfriend:

“‘There’s a word for you, Georgia my pet. You’re a proper cough drop, aren’t you?’

‘Darling, how vulgar! I thought you were going to say “bitch”.’”

The latter epithet is, of course, still in regular use and its meaning is familiar but the former is more obscure. In the late nineteenth century it was a slang term for a disagreeable person – which would seem to fit the circumstances but not quite the character or social class of Campion’s sister or the tone of the conversation and the reaction of Georgia to the name applied to her. It was also, however, used to mean a type of person for whom the term a “character” or a “card” might also be used. This suggests a degree of indulgence and a wry, humorous view of the shortcomings of the character in question. This second sense seems closer to the tone of Val’s exasperated comment to her rival. It is interesting to note the only other use of this term I have found in a similar, upper-class setting (Jeeves and the Tie That Binds by G. K. Chesterton). Wooster in an exchange with a chum says of Jeeves:

“And he has the added advantage that Bingley seems fond of him. He thinks he’s a cough drop.’

‘What an earth’s a cough drop?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s something Bingley admires.”

This suggests that there was evidently some confusion even within the circles that used the term as to the precise meaning. But if it is a term that can be applied to Jeeves then it most certainly has a positive sense. As is often the case in English, a word can have diametrically opposed meanings – positive or negative connotations – which the listener has to interpret according to the context of the conversation. Think Michael Jackson’s song Bad in which the street-use of the word means its precise opposite – extremely good.

Which brings us to another term used in The Fashion in Shrouds: “daisy”. The term is used by a policeman to describe two brothers who are suspected of involvement in criminal activities but whose response to questioning by the police skillfully frustrates the enquiry.

One dictionary records the use of the word to indicate a person who “is deemed excellent or notable”. It is possible that the policeman may be expressing grudging admiration of the brothers’ interview technique but it seems unlikely under the circumstances. He would be more likely to express his frustration with a term of disparagement.

I am therefore inclined to note that shortly before this remark is made by the policeman, one of the brothers in response to questions about whether he has seen a particular woman observes that, “There were so many girls in the world, he said. One was very much like another. He himself had no use for women.” Taking this remark in conjunction with a slang term for a group homosexual act – “a daisy chain”, I am drawn to conclude that the term in this context is a vulgar reference to the brothers being gay – at a time when practicing homosexuality was a criminal offence in the UK.

I am sometimes inclined to wish for a glossary of the terms used which would aid my understanding of the nuances and shades of meaning in conversations reported in texts from the Golden Age. The Fashion in Shrouds is liberally scattered with such terms which have now passed from common parlance – if indeed they ever were in regular use outside a limited circle of privileged upper classes.

One word that does appear in casual conversation throughout the book and which betrays a wholesale difference in values and norms than we apply today is the word “nigger”. This has now a capacity to shock when used that is almost on a par with the “nice rape”. But, as with its frequent appearance in texts such as To Kill A Mocking Bird or the works of Mark Twain, the modern reader must accept that it was used frequently without embarrassment in everyday language. That this usage in itself reveals an institutionalized racism in the society using the term is, of course, true, but it cannot be allowed to distract the reader from the storyline. That would be a mistake since it would be a wholly unintended and unanticipated line of thought on the part of the reader so far as the author was concerned. It certainly cannot be used as any sort of indicator of a character’s moral compass – that would require closer inspection of the language and attitudes within which the word is used.

I therefore conclude that the modern reader, when venturing into Golden Age society, must tune in to the tone of conversations reported to understand the many unfamiliar terms bandied about so casually and equally must avoid applying modern cultural mores to a different time and place which might distract them from the main event. My advice in this regard might well take the form of “Hold your nose and jump in.”

Tickets for the Bodies From The Library Conference 2018 are available now for a limited time at the special discounted price of £35 (full price £40). Book your ticket today to be assured of your place at the only detective fiction conference at the fabulous British Library venue and save £5 on the normal ticket price.

(Image from 2015 conference)

Agatha Christie wrote twelve short stories in the locked room mystery genre. Only one of these, The Dream, was included in the sample of such mysteries which I have been analyzing thus far. All were written in the Golden Age with the exception of Greenshaw’s Folly published in 1956.

Seven of the stories feature Hercule Poirot, four feature Miss Marple and one is a Mr Quin story.

If we compare her solutions with those used in the wider sample we find, not unsurprisingly that her most common solution is the murder from the outside, which she uses in a third of her stories. This is very much in line with the general usage of this type of solution.

Contrary to expectations, given her known expertise in the field of poisons and the fact that she uses poisons as the most common means for her murderers to kill their victims if we look at the totality of her works (see chapters two and three), we find that she uses poison as her solution for in only one of her locked room mysteries. This, again, keeps her very much in line with the general low usage of poison as a method – though as we saw in chapter nine, this is at odds with the approach taken by other women writers who resort to poison in more than a quarter of all their locked room mysteries.

Where Christie differs markedly from the general position is in her use – or rather the lack of it – of mechanical traps in her locked room mysteries. She never uses this device even though it is the second most favoured approach used by writers in the genre generally.

In contrast, the solution which Agatha uses much more than the general case is the plot where the murderer kills his victim then contrives to enter and leave the locked room so that witnesses are convinced he or she could not have done it owing to the timings. Perhaps she felt more comfortable managing the complexities of deciding a precisely timed sequence of events than dreaming up the complexities of a mechanical device. Mechanical competence was not something that was generally required of, or therefore found, in women of her generation and class.

Christie did, however, utilise a wide variety of possible solutions. In the dozen locked mystery stories she wrote, she employed seven out of the ten categories (and six out of Dickson Carr’s original seven types). Bearing in mind that she was writing in the Golden Age (i.e. before the “other” category’s first appearance) she showed remarkable inventiveness to produce such a range of very different types of solution in what must be regarded as a genre in which she was not a prolific producer of output – compared to, say, Dickson Carr.

An intriguing feature too, of the distribution of her solutions, is that all the four Miss Marple stories each employs a different type of solution whereas, of the seven Poirot stories, three, i.e. nearly half, employ the same type of solution. Furthermore, her use of an unbreakable alibi solution pre-dates the first appearance of such a solution in the general sample by more than a decade.

Perhaps one of the reasons why she reigns supreme as the Queen of Crime is that she consistently found new ways to baffle her readers and kept herself ahead of the game even in genres, such as the locked room mystery, where she was not regarded as particularly specialist.

Now if John Dickson Carr is regarded as the greatest exponent of the locked room mystery, it must be acknowledged that in its hey-day, the Golden Age, there were four acknowledged Queens of Crime whose writing overshadowed that of their contemporaries. Their dominance however tended to be in the longer form – the novel – rather than the short story, though all were formidable exponents of that more concise form too. But it is to the short story form that the locked room mystery is perhaps best suited and reaches its apogee. We should therefore consider whether there are any differences in the approaches taken by male and female authors in the short story locked room mystery, away from the more expansive form of the novel where women were the dominant gender.

The first point which becomes apparent is that the locked room mystery format is very much a male dominant genre. More than eight out of ten locked room mysteries were written by male authors. Women accounted for only one in ten with the remainder being co-written by male/female partnerships.

This overwhelming majority indicates that the locked mystery form appeals more to the male writer (we cannot deduce any conclusions about the gender of the readership from this sample). This may be a reflection of an inherent male bias in interest toward plot and puzzle rather than character – which is better developed in the longer novel form and without the sometimes contrived logic necessary to explain how and why the murderer chose a complicated way to kill the victim when a simpler approach might have been more certain.

The first observation I would make about the male writers’ solutions compared to the female writers’ solutions is the greater use of the murder from outside approach. 39% of male writers’ solutions were of this type compared with only 27% of female writers’ solutions. So it would appear that women writers preferred not to use the most common solution as much as it was used by male authors.

However, male authors did use a wider variety of solutions overall – they used all ten types considered whereas the women authors concentrated on only five of the ten possible solutions: not a murder; poison; kills then murderer is seen entering and leaving; kills from outside and other. Certainly with the exception of murders from outside and the entering and leaving to fool witnesses solutions, women used these three preferred methods significantly more (64% of their mystery solutions) than male authors (a mere 16%).

Indeed, poisoning is the most used solution by women authors (28%). Perhaps there is some truth in the hoary old adage that poison is a woman’s method?

Male authors’ favoured solutions, after murder from outside, are mechanical traps and killing before being observed entering and leaving. Together these three solutions account for 69% – more than two thirds – of all stories. So, overall, male writers are, in fact, more predictable in their choice of solution with the remaining seven types accounting for only a handful of examples each totalling less than a third of all stories.

The five male/female writing partnerships and produce very different solutions. They favour mechanical traps in more than half their stories (perhaps reflecting the male influence) but 29% (nearly one-third) are poisonings (perhaps reflecting the female influence. Interestingly they use unbreakable alibis to a much greater extent (14%) – which is seven times as frequently as male authors (2%). Is there something about the unbreakable alibi that makes it appeal to the mixed gender teams when it does not appeal to either male or female authors alone.

I have no wish to be drawn into speculation as to whether the fact that three of the five mixed gender writing partnerships are actually husband and wife teams has any bearing on their seeming preference for unbreakable alibis when compared to solo authors or same gender writing partnerships.

Now, as I have already mentioned, one of the constraints of considering a sample drawn from English language anthologies, is that there are few examples included of foreign language stories in translation, given commercial pressures. We can however, compare the use of the different types of locked room solution by British and American authors.

As might be expected, the use of the murder from outside is the most commonly employed type on both sides of the Atlantic (and by writers in other countries too albeit in smaller numbers in the sample).

Where we do see a marked contrast is in the use of mechanical traps. These are greatly favoured by British writers but markedly less so by American writers. Is there something in the British psyche which enjoys tinkering with devices? Is this the spirit of Heath Robinson with his fantastical contraptions finding an outlet in detective fiction? There is a certain whimsical element in such devices which lives on today in the animation of Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit.

In contrast, there is a marked preference for the use of those complex timetabled plots in US locked room mysteries and for the murder of the victim after the locked room is unsealed (where again the time of death is at issue and is obfuscated). These two types, particularly the latter, are markedly less popular with British writers. Is there an American preference for the complication to be in the sequence of events described rather than in some hidden operation of an unseen device. These are, by and large, murders that take place more in plain sight – indeed, for the plots to succeed, they rely on the testimony of witnesses who are fooled into thinking they see events in a certain order when they do not. I hesitate to suggest that Americans are more concerned with time than the British but I am intrigued by the possibilities, and pitfalls, of setting such a time-driven plot device in a country which has a relaxed, manana, attitude to time.

Having considered the “big picture”, we can now turn to how the locked room mystery developed over time. What were the earliest preferred methods and did this change over time.

If we look at the fourteen earliest mysteries in our sample we see that in the era before the twentieth century, the murder from outside was already the favoured solution. However, perhaps more interesting is that some solutions, such as suicide rigged to look like a murder or the murder of a stunned victim by the first person into the locked room after the supposed murder has taken place, had yet to appear. We can therefore look to see when these innovations first appeared.

Clearly at this early stage in the evolution of the short story locked room mystery form, many of the types of solution have not yet been conceived so there is less variety in the types of solution – only three out of the seven types which Dickson Carr will later codify have appeared in the stories published before 1890.

As we move into the final decade of the nineteenth century there is still a concentration of the solutions with only three types represented. It is notable that already the mechanical trap has featured alongside murder from the outside in both the very early and the late nineteenth century solutions. It may be that such devices crossed over in appeal with the readership for the gothic thrillers which were also popular at that period. Wilkie Collins, for example, wrote in the gothic genre as well as in the crime/detection genre so there was perhaps a significant area of overlap between the two forms at that stage even though they have subsequently become quite distinct.

The last decade of the nineteenth century sees the first example of that complex timetable of events which sees a murderer’s entrances and exits from the room in which the murder takes place being apparently incompatible with their being involved in the perpetration of the crime. These kinds of intellectual puzzles are, therefore, already a feature from quite early in the genesis of the locked room mystery.

We see in the Edwardian era the first instances of poison appearing in the locked room genre. I think it important here to mention that this is not to say that poison was not a method used in earlier detective fiction but that this is when we first see it appearing as a part of a locked room solution.

We also see that during the second decade of the twentieth century – the era of the First World War – the prevalence of the murder from outside (which had been the favoured method hitherto and returned to its usual prominence afterward) is challenged.

In fact, the solution turning out to not be a murder at all is for the only time in the history of the genre, equally likely to be the case. Again, it is tempting to speculate on possible reasons for this. Perhaps, in an age which was seeing death on a massive scale through man-made wars, there was an impulse to find other causes for an unexplained death than just murder?

The range of causes does, however, remain more limited than it will later become. Indeed, there is less variety of method during the second decade then during the first decade of the century. Arguably this very lack of original new methods is an indicator of a pent up pressure which will build up and explode into the variety and ingenuity of the locked room mystery solutions in the Golden Age which followed on from this era.

I would argue that the locked room genre reached its great flowering in this period. There was not only commercial pressure for writers to come up with new and ever more inventive (some might say contrived) solutions for their audiences but there was also perhaps greater awareness of the work of fellow exponents of the genre, for example through the social networks of the Detection Club which might enable an author to sound out plot ideas and, subtly, borrow from the ideas of others to build their own even more insoluble mysteries.

With the start of the Golden Age in the 1920s, we see more variety in the solutions than in previous decades. There are examples from five of Dickson Carr’s seven types of locked room mystery including two new types not seen before: suicides which have been made to look like murders and the murder of a stunned victim after the locked room has been unlocked.

And as we progress into the second decade of the Golden Age of those inter-war years, we have solutions in eight of the ten categories, covering all but one of Dickson Carr’s types plus examples for the first time of the unbreakable alibi and the impossible crime. The urge to satisfy the demand of readers for ever more ingenious puzzles is at its height now and this is reflected in the creative explosion of the Golden Age writers.

The years of the Second World War and the succeeding decade see for the first time a contraction in the variety of solutions. From a high point of eight out of ten types at the peak of the Golden Age we now find only four types in the war years and five in the next decade.

This turning away from the complex puzzles of the Golden Age might reflect a desire for a simpler world, where things are clear – divided into good and bad, black and white, which might suit a wartime mentality where the reader might feel somewhat “under siege”. Clarity is preferable to complication – more comforting.

The majority of solutions in the war years are of the “murder from the outside” type. This may unconsciously be reflecting the insularity of the reading population – wanting the psychological comfort of placing death and the murderer as coming from without rather than from within. Just as the wartime enemy is the other – the foreign – trying to invade the safety of the homeland.

In the 1950s we see also, for the first time, mysteries that fall outside the categories into which all the stories from earlier decades can be placed (or shoe-horned, if necessary). This “other” category may represent a new direction for the writers of detective fiction who remain attached to the locked room but must respond to the need for something different to challenge the readers.

As the locked room mystery continues to fall off in popularity as we move into the swinging sixties and the 1970s, the contraction in the range of solutions becomes marked. There are examples of only four of the different types by the 1960s and the most common, indeed the only type for which there is more than a single instance in the sample, is the “other” category. Did authors see this need to go beyond the traditional locked room genre as a desperate throw to stave off what seems to be a potentially terminal decline in the locked room genre?

By the 1970s the range has narrowed further with only three different types represented and, for the first time, none of the sample is an example of a locked room murder carried out from outside.

This decline continues into the 1980s with again only three different types of mystery being found in the now much contracted sample and only two of them are from the classic seven types outlined by Dickson Carr.

The above chart includes the 15 contemporary stories from the Mike Ashley edited compilation that were excluded, for reasons already given, from the main chart showing the number of stories produced by decade of writing and, unsurprisingly, given the artificial spike in the numbers of stories under consideration, we see a greater variety of solution. However, if these are excluded then there would be one poisoning and one unbreakable alibi only.

Again, though it is notable that nearly one third of the post-1990 stories feature solutions which are outside Dickson Carr’s original seven types, there is a resurgence of interest, in this artificially inflated sample, in the use of poison as the solution. Given this is arguably the simplest method of carrying out a murder without being physically present at the point of death, this makes for an uncomplicated solution to the locked room mystery in such cases. Perhaps this reflects a modern preference for realism over the joys of the puzzle while remaining true to the traditions of the genre.

Having considered the range of solutions on offer and developments in the relative emphasis placed on creating complex puzzles across the decades, it may be interesting to consider the rise and fall in popularity of each of the different types of locked room murder over time.

Taking the most common type of solution, the murder carried out by some means from outside the locked room, we see a very clear trend. This solution has progressively fallen out of favour from its high point in the Golden Age between the wars, reaching a nadir in the 1970s when there were no examples of this type of solution in the sample.

Given the eleven distinct sub-categories of this type identified by Adey, this decline suggests that there is progressively less interest, on the part of both writers and readers, from the Second World War onwards, in the more abstruse and ingenious but, perhaps, less plausible methods of “entry” that the murder required for this type of solution to work.

Turning now to Dickson Carr’s first type of locked room mystery, we see that there are two marked spikes in the prevalence of solutions where it was not, in fact, a murder. These occur in the decades 1911-1920 and 1931-1940. Could it be, since the first of these encompasses the years leading up to First World War and the second is the decade preceding the Second World War, that there is a sub-conscious reflection of the mood of the population in these years as international tensions rise and the risk of war looms. Is the twist that the murder was no murder at all evidence of wishful thinking that perhaps the political turmoil that threatens the readers may in the end be resolved without the outbreak of war?

Although it is impossible at this distance to establish any such causal link, the pattern is, as detectives of the Golden Age were so fond of saying, “suggestive”.

Poison (if we ignore the spike artificially created by the inclusion of Mike Ashley’s crop of contemporary locked room mysteries written specially in 2000) is little used as the solution for locked room mysteries. I am tempted to conclude that as a howdunnit it has little to baffle the reader looking for a puzzle. It is just too easy to explain how the murderer achieved his objective remotely. It is, ultimately, a dull solution and so, I think, was eschewed in favour of more esoteric and therefore more entertaining methods.

In contrast to the use of poison, the setting of a mechanical trap to bring about the murder of the victim clearly has appeal to the reader in search of a fantastic solution to the mystery. This type of locked room mystery scaled ever greater heights of invention to reach its peak in the second decade of the Golden Age before going off a proverbial cliff (sorry couldn’t resist that extended metaphor) in the Second World War with no examples at all in the sample from then until the 1970s.

Indeed, the level of mechanical ingenuity required, on the part of both author and their protagonist, to come up with these fiendish machines, which makes them a particular favourite of mine, may well have contributed to them subsequently dying a death (sorry, again) after the end of the puzzle oriented Golden Age. They hold, perhaps, the ultimate position on the spectrum of premeditation required – so no question of manslaughter here, other than on the grounds of diminished responsibility because only a madman would conceive of such a complicated way of achieving so simple an end – the death of the chosen victim. But they are so far away from the post-war shift towards more gritty realism that their decline seems almost inevitable.

As a solution to a locked room mystery, a suicide by a person who endeavours to give the appearance that they have been murdered by someone enjoyed a brief flowering in the Golden Age but fell into disuse after the Second World War.

This short period of “popularity” is perhaps accounted for by the psychological implausibility of the solution. Does anyone hate someone else so much that they would want to die in an effort to incriminate them so that they would be executed for the “crime”? Even if they are only bringing forward their death because they know they have a terminal illness and so they want to give their death meaning this remains hugely improbable given the desperation with which people will cling to life in even the most hopeless situations.

Clearly, once the death penalty for murder was removed (in the UK, if not in some states of the USA) then even that motivation becomes weak. No-one, surely, would commit suicide to try to get the object of their hatred locked away for a life sentence with the possibility of parole after only a handful of years. I see, therefore, little prospect of this type of solution being revived with any degree of success while ever there is no death penalty for murder.

Nevertheless, it represents an example of the way that authors in the Golden Age continued to find new, even if contrived, ways to puzzle their readers. The apparent victim “dunnit” is certainly a most unpredictable twist.

There is a clear peak in the popularity of the next type of solution proposed by Dickson Carr where the murderer somehow manages to effect the murder in the locked room but then be observed by unimpeachable witnesses to enter and or leave the room at a time which makes his or her involvement in the murder appear impossible. This type of solution requires great attention to the precise timing of the events described and for ways in which that timing might be, or at least insofar as it appears to the witnesses (and the reader), to be manipulated. It is essentially focused on the puzzle element of the timing and so it is no surprise that the peak popularity of this type of solution should have been in the Golden Age.

That the peak falls in the first decade of the Golden Age and is followed by a period of relative neglect of this potential solution suggests that this method was superseded by other types of solution, such as the increasingly complicated mechanical methods, which grew in popularity as the Golden Age progressed. Playing with the timing of the death is perhaps less “fun” for both the author to write and the reader to attempt to solve than these more involved puzzles which overtook it in popularity.

As a method though, it does continue to be used steadily throughout the subsequent decades when other methods have declined in use. This might be precisely because it does not rely on stretching the credulity of the reader too far. It remains a plausible way of trying to pull off a murder and get away with it without undue complication, and hence risk of failure, in the actual method of killing.

In contrast to some other types of solution, the murder of the pre-stunned victim by the first person on the supposed existing murder scene, or in through the door of the locked room after it has been broken down, although first used in the Golden Age, was not in favour during that inter-war period but rather retained a steady usage through the decades following the Second World War. It perhaps lacks the flair or flamboyance of some of the preferred Golden Age methods, relying as it does on swift, determined action on the part of the murderer who must retain his nerve in front of witnesses whose gaze he or she must attempt to mis-direct, rather after the fashion of a professional magician.

Looked at in this light, it can be seen why this solution might resonate with the post-war audience accustomed to a dour and unremarkable reality rather than flights of escapist fantasy.

It is interesting to note that having survived the early post-war decades, this type of solution was not found in the sample after 1980. Perhaps it is merely a reflection of the ongoing steady decline in the popularity of locked room mysteries outside the relatively limited number of aficionados of the genre.

Having exhausted the seven types of locked room mystery identified by Dickson Carr, we can now turn our attention to mysteries which, while absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the locked room, fall outside those original seven types.

The first of these is the Unbreakable Alibi (as distinct from Dickson Carr’s carefully choreographed entries and/or exits from the locked room which bamboozle the witness into believing the murderer was not, indeed could not be, guilty of the crime).

This type of solution first appeared in the latter half of the Golden Age but then disappeared and only re-surfaced again in the last decades of the twentieth century. At this point there was more emphasis on the psychological aspects in crime fiction and there was also increasing interest in the application of forensic science to the process of detection. I wonder if these priorities might account for the use of the unbreakable alibi in detective fiction latterly – where the forensic evidence, for example, points to a particular suspect, the tension in the story is derived from that person having an apparently unbreakable alibi.

The same might also apply to the next category; the so-called “impossible crime”. Appearances of this type of solution mirror exactly those of the unbreakable alibi with a first appearance in the second decade of the Golden Age followed by a period in the wilderness and a return at the end of the twentieth century. I am tempted to think that this pattern might, therefore, be subject to the same effects. The influence of television programming might also be a factor too. The trope of the locked room may be difficult to reproduce with sufficient variety in the visual settings and so authors of screenplays would be looking for something which while equally impossible is not constrained by the single concept that would quickly bore a TV audience if it reappeared constantly.

Which brings us to our final, catch-all grouping of “other”. These are the stories which no matter how I try, cannot be forced into any of the existing categories.

It is inevitable, I think, that these should all come in the last few decades of the century. Writers are by nature inventive and constantly look for new ways to entertain and, in the case of detective fiction, baffle their readers. The boundaries of the locked room must therefore be pushed further and further in pursuit of this aim until ultimately, they must be broken.

It is tempting to see this breaking out from the conventions occurring in the 1960s as in keeping with that decade’s more general throwing off of so many of the conventions of the older generation by the younger generation. Possibly as popular interest in the locked room genre declined, only a radical revolution in their production could revive them.

Any analysis of locked room mysteries must begin with John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the genre. He wrote more classic locked room mysteries, perhaps, than any other author and teased his readers with ingenious means by which seemingly impossible murders were pulled off in the confines of an apparently impregnable sealed room. The solutions to these puzzles – howdunnits – were required to be possible but need not necessarily be probable. Indeed, the murderer might frequently have carried out his crime more easily by other means. Means which might not have been investigated so closely as an apparently baffling and insoluble crime might be investigated. Who, after all, would call in the expert detective, when faced with an obvious, but wrong, solution?

In these stories, and frequently they were short stories rather than full length novels, where the tension of finding the solution to howdunnit questions is more difficult to maintain, greater emphasis was generally placed on the puzzle than on characterisation. Here, perhaps, even more than elsewhere in Detective Fiction of the Golden Age, solving the puzzle was the game being played between author and reader.

This analysis of the genre will examine trends in these mysteries over time and look at other factors which might influence the likelihood of one solution being favoured over another by the author. It may therefore assist you in directing your thinking to the more likely solutions for any given story but it will never give away a solution.

According to John Dickson Carr, there are no less than seven distinct types of locked room mystery. At least that is what his character Dr Fell tells the readers in chapter seventeen of his 1935 classic The Hollow Man (widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of that genre). To summarise Dr Fell’s categorisations as a reminder for those who have read the book some time ago or to enable those who have yet to do so to benefit from Dr Fell’s elucidation while skipping over the relevant chapter (as Dickson Carr invites them to do) so they can get on with the plot, the categories he proposes are:

1. The murder is not a murder but is, in fact, an accident. The circumstances are such that it appears there has been a murder but this is not the case. Instead there has been a fatal accident within the locked room. Hence no murderer was present or has made his escape without leaving any trace. Often the accident will involve a fall with the victim striking their head a blow on the fender. This method is becoming more difficult to carry off now with open fireplaces being replaced by central heating.

2. The murder is achieved by means of a poison gas which overcomes the victim (perhaps driving him into a frenzied paroxysm which causes damage to the furniture leading to investigators mistakenly believing a desperate fight has taken place between the victim and the murderer).

3. The murder is done by a mechanical trap planted in the room, which is set off by the victim while the murderer is safely elsewhere. The trick here is to make the method by which the trap is sprung undetectable and, if the trap is concealed, for the weapon to return to (or else remain in) its place of concealment after being triggered – such as a gun hidden in the workings of a clock which fires when the clock is being wound (a method which surely is falling out of fashion due to the inexorable rise of battery or mains electricity powered clocks).

4. It is suicide which is rigged up to look like murder, frequently with the intention of incriminating an innocent party against whom the suicide holds a grudge. The weapon might be an icicle with which the victim stabs himself. The icicle then melts, speeded no doubt by the fading body heat of the “victim”. In the absence of a weapon in the body, murder is presumed with the supposed murderer having made his escape with the weapon.

5. The murderer impersonates the victim after having first killed him. The murderer is later observed to enter the room disguised as the victim. He emerges immediately afterward having slipped out of the disguise thereby giving himself the alibi of having been seen to leave the room without having had sufficient time to commit the murder. The timing of the death is critical in this category; the elapsed time between actual and supposed later time of death must be sufficiently short for the body to be in an appropriate state of rigor mortis and at the correct post-mortem temperature.

6. The murderer manages to carry out the murder from outside the room in a manner which suggests that the murderer was inside the room to carry out the killing. Bullets made of ice, or even frozen blood, have been fired in through windows and subsequently melted leaving no trace to detect the method used.

7. This is the reverse of category 5. Here, the murderer has merely stunned or otherwise rendered the victim unconscious. They leave the room and after a suitable interval, during which no-one enters or leaves the now locked room, ensure they are on hand as efforts to break down the door are made. They ensure they are first into the room and in the initial confusion after entry is gained, they killed the unconscious victim swiftly – a stiletto is a favoured method – while misdirecting the others who have crashed into the room with them. This gives the impression that the victim has been lying dead in the hitherto locked room for some time.

If any of you are currently reading a book where it turns out that one of these tricks has been used, please don’t blame me for having outlined the method here. I’m only repeating Dr Fell’s 80 year old lecture which anyone can read for themselves.
Naturally, others have endeavoured to categorise such mysteries differently. Robert Adey in his book Locked Room Murders identifies twenty possible solutions:

1. Accident
2. Suicide
3. Remote control – the use of poison gas or the victim is impelled to kill themselves inadvertently
4. Mechanical or other devices
5. An animal carries out the murder
6. An outside intervention is made to appear as if the murder has taken place by a murderer inside the locked room, e.g. by throwing a dagger through a window at the victim from outside the room
7. The victim has been killed earlier but is made to appear as if they were alive at a later point
8. The victim is presumed to be dead but is in fact killed later than believed, e.g. by first person to enter the room
9. The victim is wounded outside the locked room but enters, locks the room and dies inside
10. The key, bolt or catch securing the door is manipulated from the outside, using pliers, string or some other device, to lock the door after the murderer has exited
11. The door or window of the room is unhinged and removed to gain entry and the murderer then replaces it after committing the crime
12. As above but confining the removal to a window pane
13. Entry to the room is gained by some acrobatic manoeuvre
14. The door is locked or wedged from the outside and the key is only replaced on the inside after entry to the room by those who find the body
15. As above but the key is returned into the room before everyone enters to discover the body
16. Other methods of gimmicking the door or windows
17. The murderer enters and exits through a secret panel or uses one to enable the weapon to be propelled at the victim
18. The murderer is in the room all the time
19. The murderer is provided with an alibi for the critical time when the murder is committed
20. Other impersonation stunts

It will be apparent that the more detailed breakdown suggested by Adey is a refinement of Dickson Carr’s approach. While it offers greater precision, for the purposes of statistical analysis it is more problematic. In order to draw meaningful conclusions from analysis of a sample, if there are twenty possible categories rather than seven, you will need a vastly larger sample to ensure that the resulting numbers are not spuriously accurate.

In fact, Adey’s twenty solutions can be allocated, or in some cases “shoehorned in”, as mere subsets to one or other of Dickson Carr’s categories.

As can be seen from the table, fully half of Adey’s twenty methods are variations on the theme which Dickson Carr pulls together under the catch-all heading of being achieved from outside.

Which brings me now to the vexed question of how to satisfy the ideal of selecting a random sample of locked room mysteries from which to draw statistically meaningful conclusions.
Out of the countless thousands of detective fiction stories I have neither the time, nor the boredom threshold to read them all and identify the “population” of locked room mysteries from which to derive a random sample for analysis. I must, therefore, fall back on a more practical method of selection. I will turn to a number of compilations, edited by recognised authorities on the genre, and trust that these will provide a suitably randomised sample for my purposes. I would contend that since the editors’ selections are based on aesthetic/literary grounds with an eye to commercial success, and not based on the criteria under which I am intending to make my analysis that their choices are suffieciently “random” for my purposes. It also, thankfully, means I get to read a selection of stories that the editors, whose views I respect on such matters, think are going to be amongst the best of the genre.

My sample for analysis is therefore the collected stories in the following compilations:

The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes edited by Mike Ashley

Miraculous Mysteries: Locked-Room Murders and Impossible Crimes edited by Martin Edwards

Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums edited by J.J.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler

These give me a sample for analysis of 114 stories which should suffice to draw some meaningful conclusions about the writing, and reading, of locked room mysteries.

The first caveat I have to stress is that I am reading in English which gives a huge bias towards the UK and US markets for detective fiction. The “other category” includes Ireland, South Africa and Australia – all native English speaking – with only a couple of translations from the original French. This sample therefore doesn’t reflect the diversity of locked room story-writing globally but does reflect the paucity of translations of short-stories – sadly a reflection of commercial constraints, there being little profit in a short story sale compared to a sale of a novel which might therefore be worth translating for the English speaking markets. I would also add that the slight weighting in favour of UK over US mysteries is largely attributable to the selection of stories in the Martin Edwards compilation which is devoted to UK writers of the genre.

The period covered by the four compilations starts in 480BC (a single outlying example in the J.J. compilation) but really starts in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The chart shows a growing interest in the locked room mysteries from the beginnings of modern detective fiction in the nineteenth century through to the second world war. There is then a marked decline up to the current time. It is not too strong to describe interest in the genre as going off a cliff edge during the second world war. It is interesting to speculate why this might be. One possibility is the shift away from the puzzle element of the Golden Age of detective fiction to a greater emphasis on character. Certainly the locked room mystery places less emphasis on characters and motivation and more on methodology of the criminal. Indeed, it is often as much a howdunnit? as a whodunnit? with consequence precedence of plot over psychological motivation.
I should also mention that the above chart excludes fifteen of the stories included in the Mike Ashley compilation on the grounds that this modern compilation was intended to feature heavily works written (some even commissioned for the compilation) by contemporary writers of the genre. Their inclusion would have resulted in a massive spike in the final decade of the chart which would distort the picture and create the impression of a resurgence which, while this may be enjoyed by a small but dedicated audience for locked room mysteries, is not an accurate reflection of a wider popular interest.

We can now look at how these 114 locked room mysteries fall into the categories outlined by Dickson Carr. In order to avoid yet more shoe-horning, I have included, in addition to the seven categories of Dr Fell’s lecture, three additional categories which I think are sufficiently distinct as to merit recording separately. These are: Unbreakable Alibis, Impossible Crimes (i.e. in the spirit of the locked room but not involving a locked room or its equivalent) and Others, as a catch all for stories that defy categorisation under any of the other headings no matter how hard I try to get them to conform to one or other of the headings.

As you might expect, the most common form of locked room solution is that the murder was committed from outside – often by one of the sub-headings identified by Adey. I ought to emphasise that none of these murders from outside is so mundane as simply shooting the victim through an open window, which would not count as a true locked room mystery unless, for example, it was done with a pistol which was subsequently tossed into the room to give the impression that the victim had killed himself and then dropped the weapon. (This would qualify as a crude locked room mystery but might be improved if somehow the murderer contrived to have the victim to have scorch marks or powder burns apparently from the shot to increase the evidence suggesting it was suicide.)
I have a particular fondness for the next most common approach, the mechanical trap. These generally demand a high degree of ingenuity on the part of the murderer to set the trap in such a way that it will not be evident afterwards how the trap worked but, perhaps, even more than other locked room types tend toward a plot-bias over character-bias in the construction of the story. That the murderers could have achieved their goal more simply and at less risk of either failure or of detection by the experts called in to solve the crime is one of the ways in which I am happy for my credulity to be stretched a little.

The third most common solution is one used extensively by Dickson Carr himself in which the murder is seen entering and/or leaving the room which is subsequently found locked thereby “proving” that he could not have dunnit. This solution relies on accurate timing and an ability to misdirect both readers and the all important witnesses who testify to the murderer’s movements.

Poisoning – so easily achieved by the murderer in absentia – and the supposed murder turning out not to be anything of the kind are the other most frequently encountered solutions but, to my mind, they lack the sparkle of the more complicated solutions which, I think, have greater appeal as puzzles. That said, some of the reasons why it was not a murder are thoroughly ingenious.