The locked room mystery is a sub-genre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under apparently impossible circumstances. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene that no intruder could have entered or left, e.g., a locked room. 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.
To investigators of the crime, the prima facie impression almost invariably is that the perpetrator has vanished into thin air. The need for a rational explanation for the crime is what drives the protagonist to look beyond these appearances and solve the puzzle.
Read more about Locked Room Mystery: History of The Genre, Examples, Authors and Works, Radio, Television and Film, Pulp Magazines, Comic Books/graphic Novels, True Crimes
Famous quotes containing the words locked room, locked, room and/or mystery:
“However, there is a locked room up there
with an iron door that can’t be opened.
It has all your bad dreams in it.
It is hell.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful.”
—Rose Hoffman, U.S. public school third-grade teacher. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“Suicide , moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)