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 and/or mystery:
“Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes;
Treason is but trusted like the fox,
Who never so tame, so cherished and locked up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your example, that there’s never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience—but it won’t help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)