The French writer Paul Halter, whose output of over 30 novels is almost exclusively of the locked-room genre, has been described as the natural successor to John Dickson Carr. Hoch's protagonist is a gifted amateur detective who uses pure brainpower to solve his cases. The majority of Hoch stories feature impossible crimes one appeared in EQMM every month from May 1973 through January 2008. Sam Hawthorne, whose main role is as a country physician. Hoch, whose short stories feature a detective, Dr. The most prolific creator of impossible crimes is Edward D. Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective novels feature locked-room puzzles.

The genre continued into the 1970s and beyond. In Robert van Gulik's mystery novel The Chinese Maze Murders (1951), one of the cases solved by Judge Dee is an example of the locked-room subgenre. A number have been translated into English. The most prolific writer during the period immediately following the Golden Age was Japanese: Akimitsu Takagi wrote almost 30 locked-room mysteries, starting in 1949 and continuing to his death in 1995. They also co-authored the psychological thrillers which brought them international fame, two of which were adapted for the screen as Vertigo ( 1954 novel 1958 film) and Diabolique (1955 film). French authors continued writing into the 1950s and early 1960s, notably Martin Meroy and Boileau-Narcejac, who joined forces to write several locked-room novels. Edgar Faure, later to become Prime Minister of France, was a not particularly successful contemporary.ĭuring the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, English-speaking writers dominated the genre, but after the 1940s there was a general waning of English-language output. In French, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Gaston Boca, Marcel Lanteaume, Pierre Véry, Noel Vindry, and the Belgian Stanislas-André Steeman were other important 'impossible crime' writers, Vindry being the most prolific with 16 novels. ) Three other Carr/Dickson novels were in the top ten of the 1981 list: The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Judas Window (1938), and The Peacock Feather Murders (1937). (Leroux's novel was named third in that same poll Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) was named second. His 1935 novel The Hollow Man (US title: The Three Coffins) was in 1981 voted the best locked-room mystery novel of all time by 17 authors and reviewers, although Carr himself names Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907–1908) as his favorite. John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, was known as 'master of the locked-room mystery'. Van Dine in The Canary Murder Case (1927), Ellery Queen in The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), and Freeman Wills Crofts in such novels as Sudden Death and The End of Andrew Harrison. Chesterton's Father Brown stories often featured locked-room mysteries, and other mystery authors have also dabbled in the genre, such as S.

Van Dusen and Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune ( The Mystery of the Yellow Room), written in 1907 by French journalist and author Gaston Leroux. Other early locked-room mysteries include Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892) ' The Adventure of the Empty House' (1903), a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle ' The Problem of Cell 13' (1905) by Jacques Futrelle, featuring 'The Thinking Machine' Augustus S. Robert Adey credits Sheridan Le Fanu for A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess (1838), which was published three years before Poe's “Rue Morgue”.

The earliest fully-fledged example of this type of story is generally held to be Edgar Allan Poe's ' The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841). The need for a rational explanation for the crime is what drives the protagonist to look beyond these appearances and solve the puzzle. The prima facie impression of seeing a locked room crime is that the perpetrator is a dangerous, supernatural entity capable of defying the laws of nature by walking through walls or vanishing into thin air. Following other conventions of classic detective fiction, the reader is normally presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in a dramatic climax. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left for example, a victim found deceased in a windowless room that is sealed from the inside at the time of discovery. The crime in question, typically murder ('locked-room murder'), is committed in circumstances under which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of the crime scene. The ' locked-room' or ' impossible crime' mystery is a type of crime seen in crime and detective fiction.

Locked heart drawing