Musings - Locked Room Mysteries

Locked-room murders are located in a confined space where no one can enter or leave without being seen.  Making it an impossible murder.  It can be more than a single room, but also trains, planes, boats, elevators, cars, isolated island, trapped at a beach resort or ski resort, and so many others.  This is popular because it is not only a "whodunit" but a "howdunit".  The solutions are often clever and rely on questioning all assumptions.

The first locked room mystery was the1841 Edgar Allen Poe story Murders in the Rue Morgue where fictional detective August Dupin investigates two murders in a locked room on the fourth floor of a house.  In 1907 French author Gaston Laroux published The Mystery of the Yellow Room and he is often credited with the first locked-room murder novel.  The Mystery of the Yellow Room is certainly given more critical aclaim than Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue and gets mentioned with praise in John Dickson Carr's novel by his detective as well as the incomperable Agatha Christie has Hercules Poirot likewise praise the novel.  

Agatha Christie wrote the most locked-room mysteries and provided us with perhaps the most famous example in And Then There Were None were ten people are stranded on an island and begin to be killed off one-by-one.  

The 1980's television series Remington Steele had one episode, In the Steele of the Night, where a murder took place on an elevator between floors and nobody else in the elevator.

Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes solve a traditional locked-room murder in The Speckled Band.  Author John Dickson Carr was also considered the master of locked-room mysteries.  Ruth Ware has written two notable locked-room mysteries, The Woman in Cabin 10 and One by One.  

Are you a fan of the locked-room murder mystery?  What is your favorite?  What locked-room mystery have you read recently?  Please share in the comments.