Intriguing Locked Room Mysteries to Challenge the Keenest Armchair Detective
Posted on January 7, 2025
by Amy H
The epitome of the impossible crime, the locked room mystery presents the challenge of a seemingly unsolvable mystery to the wiliest detective minds. These clever sleuths show how it’s one thing to solve a crime, and quite another to sift through the tiniest vague clues and outfox murderers who are smugly confident they’ve gotten away with it. The eventual revelation of what happened is fun and tricky entertainment for all.
he who whispers by John Dickson Carr
When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in France years before; the murder of a man in a tower with only one staircase, under watch at the time at which the murder took place. With theories of levitating vampires abounding, the story comes home to Miles when he realizes that the librarian he has just hired for his home is none other than Fay Seton, a woman at the heart of this bizarre and unsolved past murder.
murder on the orient express by Agatha Christie
While in route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, the Orient Express is stopped dead in its tracks by a snowdrift. Passengers awake to find the train still stranded and to discover that a wealthy American has been brutally stabbed to death in his private compartment. Only the great Inspector Poirot can solve the case!
the 7 1/2 deaths of evelyn hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Aiden Bishop knows the rules. Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day at 11:00 p.m. until he can identify her killer and break the cycle of the endlessly repeating day. He can't escape until he solves the murder. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest at Blackheath Manor. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others. This is a breathlessly addictive locked-room mystery that follows one man's race against time to find a killer, and he soon realizes that nothing and no one are quite what they seem.
the honjin murders by Seishi Yokomizo
In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a daughter of an important local family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour - it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions about the family all around the village. Then, on the night of the wedding, the family are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music - death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. The murder seems impossible, but amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is determined to get to the bottom of it
rain dogs by Adrian McKinty
Irish Detective Sean Duffy is tired of endless heartbreaking cases he can solve but never get to court. But then the jaded detective gets two locked-room mysteries in a row. When journalist Lily Bigelow is found dead in the courtyard of the local castle, it looks like a suicide. Yet there are a few things that bother Duffy enough to keep the case file open. Which is how he finds out that she was working on a devastating investigation of corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power in the UK and beyond. And now Duffy has two impossible problems on his desk: Who killed Lily Bigelow? And what were they trying to hide?
the red widow murders by John Dickson Carr
They say that a particular room in Lord Mantling’s mansion is haunted. Known as the Red Widow’s Chamber, the now-sealed quarters once housed the wife of a guillotine operator in the French Revolution. Since she died, the house has been the setting for a century of unsolved horrors, from the death of a man in 1802 to the death of a child in 1895, and a number of mysterious mortalities in the years in between. Now, in 1935, eight men and women join at the manor for a sinister experiment to determine the truth behind the haunting once and for all: they each draw a card, and whoever pulls the Ace of Spades must spend a night in that terrifying room. But the challenge turns fatal when the man selected for the task is found poisoned the next morning when the doors are opened. The locked room was guarded all night, so nobody could have entered or escaped; what’s more, the deadly toxin could only have entered through a break in the skin, but no wounds were discovered on the body. Is this evidence, at last, of a nefarious spirit at work, or of a diabolical and ingenious killer? Can Sir Henry Merrivale, called in to take note of the night’s proceedings, examine the clues and deduce the truth?
the white priory murders by Carter Dickson
James Bennett has been invited to stay at White Priory for Christmas among the retinue of the glamorous Hollywood actress Marcia Tait. Her producer, her lover, the playwright for her next hit and her agent are all here, soon to become suspects when Tait is found murdered in the lakeside pavilion. Only the footprints of her discoverer disturb the snow which fell overnight - and which stopped just shortly after Marcia was last seen alive. How did the murderer get in and out of the pavilion without leaving a trace? When Bennett's uncle, the cantankerous amateur sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale arrives from London to make sense of this impossible crime, sorting through beguiling false clues and revealing one of the most ingenious solutions in the history of the mystery genre.
the black lizard big book of locked-room mysteries
Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler has collected sixty-eight of the all-time best impossible-crime stories from almost two hundred years of the genre. The collection expands the definition of the locked room to include tales of unbelievable thefts and incredible disappearances. Among these pages are appearances by some of the cleverest characters in all of crime, including Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Georges Simenon's Jules Maigret, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, and many more.
the chinese orange mystery by Ellery Queen
The offices of publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent ---the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room--is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of the corpse's shirt are two long spears--and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl. Enter amateur sleuth Ellery Queen, who arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body, only to be immediately drawn into a complex case in which no clue is too minor or too glaring to warrant careful consideration. One of the best locked room mysteries of all time, this is a "fair-play" mystery in which readers have all the clues needed to solve the crime.
hercule poirot's christmas by Agatha Christie
The wealthy Simeon Lee has demanded that all four of his sons-one faithful, one prodigal, one impecunious, one sensitive-and their wives return home for Christmas. But a heartwarming family holiday is not exactly what he has in mind. He bedevils each of his sons with barbed insults and finally announces that he is cutting off their allowances and changing his will. So when the old man is found lying in a pool of blood on Christmas Eve, there is no lack of suspects. Did Lee's taunts push one of the boys to a desperate act? And how did the murderer escape from the locked room? Intrepid Belgian detective Hercule Poirot suspends his own holiday festivities to sift through the motives and evidence surrounding the crime.
the mystery of the "yellow room" by Gaston Leroux
How could a murder take place in a locked room, which shows no sign of anyone else coming or going? Rivals detective Frédéric Larson and investigative journalist Joseph Rouletabille compete to solve the crime. Larson finds a suspect who is put on trial, only to have him cleared by Rouletabille, who reveals in the most dramatic fashion the identity of the real murderer.
golden age locked room mysteries
Fourteen impossible crimes from the American masters of the locked room mystery. During the years between the two world wars, the best writers in the genre strove to outdo one another with unfathomable crime scenes and brilliant explanations, and the puzzling and clever tales they produced in those brief decades remain unmatched to this day.
miraculous mysteries
Impossible crime stories have been relished by puzzle-lovers ever since the invention of detective fiction. Fiendishly intricate cases were particularly well suited to the cerebral type of detective story that became so popular during the ‘golden age of murder’ between the two world wars. But the tradition goes back to the days of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, and impossible crime stories have been written by such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. This anthology celebrates their work, alongside long-hidden gems by less familiar writers. Together these stories demonstrate the range and high accomplishment of the classic British impossible crime story over more than half a century.
murder in mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
Amy Leatheram has never felt the lure of the mysterious East, but when she travels to an ancient site deep in the Iraqi desert to nurse the wife of a celebrated archaeologist, events prove stranger than she could ever have imagined. Her patient's bizarre visions and nervous terror seem unfounded, but as the oppressive tension in the air thickens, events come to a terrible climax -- in murder. With one spot of blood as his only clue, Hercule Poirot must embark on a journey not just across the desert, but into the darkest crevices of the human soul to unravel a mystery which taxes even his remarkable powers.
the hunting party by Lucy Foley
During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they've chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands -- the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves. They arrive on December 30th, just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group's tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year's Eve, the cord holding them together snaps. On New Year's Day, one of them is dead, and another of them did it.
suddenly at his residence by Christianna Brand
While the Blitz bombards London, the boisterous grandchildren of Sir Richard March have descended upon the family Manor in Kent to learn about the new details of the patriarch's will. Disgruntled by the behavior and life choices of his heirs, Sir Richard seems poised to deny all of them their inheritance and heads out to his lodge to make arrangements - only to be discovered dead the next morning with strychnine in his blood. With evidence at the crime scene suggesting that nobody could possibly have entered the lodge to murder Sir Richard, Inspector Cockrill has the challenge of finding any plausible solution for this impossible crime before death comes to darken the doors of the manor once more.
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