Customer Reviews

Death Locked in: An Anthology of Locked-Room Mysteries

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Although the title of this book is a little misleading (e.g., some of its items have nothing to do with death or even crime, and/or some concern people or objects that vanish), DEATH LOCKED IN (a rather thick book with 553 pages) should provide many hours of enjoyment to anyone who likes to test her or his wits with first-rate puzzle stories.

This anthology contains 24 "stories," 22 of which are narrative fiction ("The First Locked Room" is a reconstruction of a true crime by Lillian de la Torre, and "The Adventure of the Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds" is a radio play by Ellery Queen). A few of its stories have frequently been reprinted elsewhere (Wilkie Collins's "A Terribly Strange Bed," G. K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man," and Clayton Rawson's "Off the Face of the Earth"), but most of them will be new to most readers.

Five stories which I especially enjoyed for a variety of reasons were Sheridan Le Fanu's "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess," Fredric Brown's "The Spherical Ghoul," Cornell Woolrich's "The Room with Something Wrong," Bill Pronzini's "Thin Air," and Anthony Boucher's "Elsewhen" (the last being a science fiction tale with a time machine). Even when some stories have plot holes or other serious flaws--and "The Man Who Disappeared" by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace has very many--I felt that they always had some compensating factors that make them worth reading.

In a sense, Conan Doyle's work is present twice: once with his own story, "The Mystery of the Lost Special" (about a train that vanishes), and again with Nicholas Carter's "The Mystery of Room No. 11" (which plagiarizes at least two key plot elements from the Sherlock Holmes tale "The Man with the Twisted Lip").

Other authors included in this anthology are Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Jacque Futrelle (and his wife May), John Dickson Carr, Edward D. Hoch, Ngaio Marsh, M. McDonnell Bodkin (and M.M.B.), L. Frank Baum, and Peter Godfrey.

One of the editors, Douglas G. Greene, wrote a short introduction to the whole volume, and he and his co-editor, Robert C. S. Adey, have written short headnotes for each of the works included. My chief complaint is that the book has an annoyingly large number of typos of all sorts--but I still rate it five stars.