Books: Riddle me this

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

Locked room mysteries, claims Otto the Editor, are "the ultimate manifestation of the cerebral detective story". These 68 examples range across crimes from poisoning to perforation; guns to grudges; broodings to bludgeonings.

Sometimes the setting is literally a locked room/flat/house. At other times it's a more metaphorical setting: a sandwich board; a summerhouse; an unmarked snowbank; an untouched field. In each case, we progress from the impossible puzzle to the inevitable solution, which as Penzler concedes, carries a risk of disappointment. However, it's not the arrivals but the journeys which matter.

We start with Poe's 170-year-old, fourth-floor killings in the Rue Morgue (how long since a thriller writer felt able to pause and discuss Greek philosophers?), and Jacque Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13, originally published as a serial with a prize for anybody who solved the riddle. Someone did, the killjoy.

We end 900 tightly-printed pages later with Martin Edwards' 21st century spouse-smearing plan gone awry, Waiting for Godstow. Yes, nifty title.

A less nifty title, The Locked Room To End Locked Rooms, by Stephen Barr, grumbles at the genre, then exploits it to bisect an utter cad with an axe, in a house which is not merely locked, but bolted and sealed.

All short story collections, even ones with significantly sizeable 15,000-20,000 word inclusions like this one, have inherent limitations. Read more than four at a sitting, and you start forgetting who did what to whom, why and where and when.

It's a book you should sample like a bag of licorice allorts. Both are multi-layered. Both need to be chewed thoughtfully. Both can make you feel glutted if taken in excess.

Among the big names of the genre (yes, Ellery Queen is here), Edward Hoch narrates a satanic attack on an empty path. John Dickson Carr, frequently called the greatest practitioner in the field, makes his obese, all-seeing Dr Gideon Fell endure an interminable monologue by a lake. Then, under a pseudonym, he sends another protagonist into a Kentish country house devoid of inhabitants and even servants, by jove.

Equally big names more familiar from other genres include Simenon, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie. PG Wodehouse has a straight narrative with a crooked plot that brings a cobra to a Southampton boarding house. Stephen King attempts a Sherlock Holmes story, and shows mainly how good Conan Doyle was. Leslie Charteris' wonderful Saint, he who makes James Bond seem like a yokel, sorts out an improbable suicide in a hotel suite.

Then come the medium to minor names.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian includes a Persian dancing girl, a peculiar overcoat, and a disapearance on Broadway. Professional stage illusionist Clayton Rawson manages a UFO, Mayan script, and a three-toed footprint.

There's even an Australian, A.E. Martin, with a heavily jocular tale of rural grotesques and a dead human cannonball. Alas, there are no New Zealanders.

The writing is a tad mechanical; it's a rare thing to find a crime writer whose dialogue sounds natural. The settings are sometimes stock and the characters sometimes stick - as in figures. But for afficionados, that's irrelevant. The whodunnits, howdoits and whydoits are satisfying and frequently spectacular.

The Locked-Room Mysteries
ed by Otto Penzler
(Corvus $49.99)

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.