Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (An American Mystery Classic)

May 1, 2022
Fourteen stories, originally published between 1930 and 1949, in which valuables are stolen from impregnable strongholds, victims are poisoned through inexplicable means, and, of course, murderers escape from rooms locked from the inside. As Penzler warns in his introduction, readers "will inevitably be disappointed" by magic tricks whose logistics are eventually, and necessarily, explained in detail. The greatest feat of prestidigitation here, in fact, may be the lack of overlap with Penzler's monumental 2014 collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries. Although 10 authors are represented in both volumes, only one story, Ellery Queen's novella The House of Haunts, also known as The Lamp of God, is duplicated--and no wonder, since this tale of a house that disappears overnight continues to impress despite its wild implausibilities. The other extended story, John Dickson Carr's The Third Bullet, is cluttered, convoluted, and much less sharp than Carr's many locked-room novels. The rest of the stories, good but not great, include Cornell Woolrich's brisk, efficient "Murder at the Automat," MacKinlay Kantor's brief, pungent "The Light at Three O'Clock," Manly Wade Wellman's frantically paced "Murder Among Magicians," Fredric Brown's "Whistler's Murder," most notable for its wonderful last line, Mignon G. Eberhart's not-so-impossible "The Calico Dog," C. Daly King's how-did-he-escape puzzle "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem," Craig Rice's "His Heart Could Break," in which lawyer John J. Malone identifies the person who hanged his jailed client, Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Exact Opposite," a rapid-fire tale of professional thief Lester Leith, and Anthony Boucher's inverted tale of time-traveling murder. Best in show: Clayton Rawson's "Off the Face of the Earth," a deft double disappearance solved and partly executed by the Great Merlini, and Joseph Commings' "Fingerprint Ghost," which asks which suspect shrugged off a straitjacket to kill a magician. Lock your door and enjoy.

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Starred review from May 30, 2022
In the thoughtful introduction to this superb anthology of impossible crime stories, Penzler notes the inherent tension of such tales (“Be warned. As you read these astoundingly inventive stories, you will inevitably be disappointed, just as explanations of stage illusions exterminate the spell of magic that we experienced as we watched the impossible occur”), and anticipates that readers, as they see how the impossibilities are explained, will shift from awe to admiration. As is typical in American Mystery Classics anthologies, the 14 entries include the best-known practitioners in this subgenre, including Ellery Queen, as well as names few will recognize, such as MacKinlay Kantor. The plots range from a mystery featuring time travel, Anthony Boucher’s “Elsewhen,” to a disappearance of a corrupt judge inspired by an actual case, despite the jurist’s being watched by multiple cops at the time he vanished from a phone booth, in Clayton Rawson’s “Off the Face of the Earth.” Unsurprisingly, top honors go to John Dickson Carr’s “The Third Bullet,” in which a judge is shot to death under three impossible circumstances. This is a perfect introduction for those new to this particular subgenre.