Locked Room Mystery - Radio, Television and Film

Radio, Television and Film

• In the 1940s and 1950s John Dickson Carr wrote a series of radio plays for the BBC's Appointment with Fear, and subsequently for CBS' Suspense series. Recordings of these plays are readily available on CD and the transcripts of many can be found in two collections: The Door to Doom and The Dead Sleep Lightly, both edited by Douglas G. Greene.
• Blacke's Magic featured a magician who used his skills to solve seemingly magical events.
• Jonathan Creek, not a magician himself but a designer of magic tricks, featured in a BBC UK television series in which almost every episode featured an 'impossible' crime (many of them locked room mysteries).
• Banacek was an American television series about an investigator specializing in locked-room thefts and other seemingly impossible mysteries.
• The TV series Monk (starring Tony Shalhoub) featured several locked room puzzles, such as a Navy lieutenant shot dead in his cabin on a submarine (Mr. Monk Is Underwater), when the gunshot was heard by witnesses outside, or a monkey that supposedly shot its master when he barricaded himself in his panic room during a burglary (Mr. Monk and the Panic Room).
• The most recent television-based incarnation of Ellery Queen contained a number of locked room puzzles and impossible crimes (including The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep).
• Other television series have contained locked-room episodes:
  • Murder, She Wrote: episode entitled "We're Off to Kill the Wizard"
  • CSI: season 3 episode 13, "Random Acts of Violence", season 7 episode 16, "Monster in the Box",
  • Psych: episode entitled "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece".
  • Dalziel and Pascoe: episode entitled "Houdini's Ghost".
  • Remington Steele: episode entitled "Now You Steele It, Now You Don't".
  • "McMillan & Wife": season 2, episode 3, entitled ""Cop of the Year"".
  • Columbo: episode entitled "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine".
  • The X-Files: episode entitled "Squeeze".
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: episode #563, "Field of Fire"
  • Dragnet 1967: episode 17, "The Big Bullet"
• The movies Flightplan and Fracture both contain variations on the locked room mystery. In the former, a child disappears from an airplane in the middle of a flight; in the latter, the killer manages to make the murder weapon disappear despite his house being entirely surrounded by police.
• Ayatsuri Sakon is a Japanese anime series about Tachibana Sakon, a student and a traditional bunraku performer (a style of traditional Japanese theatre employing very detailed life-sized puppets). In his spare time, though, he is an amateur sleuth. And his partner in his investigations is his red-haired, loud-mouthed puppet, Ukon. Together they run into locked room murders and solve them.
• The anime series Tantei Gakuen Q/Detective Academy Q is the story of a group of young students from Class Q of Dan Detective School (DDS), a prestigious and renowned detective academy founded by Morihiko Dan, the most famous detective in Japan, and the adventures and mysteries they unfold and solve together. Almost every case has a locked room mystery or other type of impossible crime (episodes 33 and 34 are an homage to John Dickson Carr, and two of his Carter Dickson novels are mentioned).
• Two episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya feature a locked room murder mystery.
• Ayumu Narumi solves a locked room mystery in the second episode of Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning.
• In the McMillan & Wife episode, "Guilt by Association", the chief must solve the murder of a jury member sequestered in a guarded room of a high-rise hotel.
• In the movie Armour of God, Jackie Chan enters a cave-like prison which is bolted from outside and is able to put the bolt back to the door from inside.
• In the anime series Detective Conan, many episodes feature locked room murders.
• The pilot episode of the science fiction series, Alphas, contains a locked room mystery.
• The 2nd episode of BBC's Sherlock, "The Blind Banker", features a variant of this scenario. A code is left painted on the wall of an office in a bank, the perpetrator vanishing seemingly without a trace as the only door into the office is remotely locked and nobody had opened it on the night of the incident. This is also used on the two murder victims, both of whom were shot and killed in their seemingly impenetrable apartments.
• The Japanese TV drama Kagi no Kakatta Heya (The Locked Room Murders) is based on the Yusuke Kishi novel of the same name. Each episode follows a pair of attorneys and a lock enthusiast from a security company as they solve locked room mysteries.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) films.
• Umineko no Naku Koro ni