alt title(s): Locked Room
A seemingly impossible crime. The standard example being that of a murder victim found in a room with only a single door, securely locked from the inside. Can be the basis for a single plot, or an entire show. A well-designed
Locked Room Mystery provides pleasure from trying to figure out the puzzle before it is revealed, from moments of dawning realisation, and from a satisfyingly logical solution. A poorly designed
Locked Room Mystery only provides a feeling of having been cheated.
Originally from crime fiction, John Dickson Carr being an acknowledged master. It is noteworthy that
Edgar Allan Poe's short story
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, widely considered to be the first detective story, involves a
Locked Room Mystery.
Appears on television in a number of forms. The relatively pure form as a sub-genre of crime television (e.g.,
Monk, Jonathan Creek) where the puzzle is eventually unravelled by an eccentric protagonist using subtle clues and pure reason.
The part of the show where the solution to the mystery is explained is
The Summation. Common causes include
Time Delayed Death or a
Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Although it is not a crime show, the anime Spiral has a number of locked room mysteries that the protagonist must solve, including one literal locked room murder.
- The Suzumiya Haruhi two part episode "Remote Island Syndrome" (and the corresponding chapter in one of the light novels) has a fairly brilliantly-executed example of this.
- Detective Conan frequently uses these. Mostly, the killer sets up an elaborate trap involving string or melting ice.
Film
- To some extent, I, Robot fits this trope: Dr. Alfred J. Lanning's death looks like an open-and-shut suicide because the door to his room was locked. Spooner, of course, thinks otherwise.
- Lampooned in the movie "Murder by Death", which pretty much makes fun of all fiction crime characters - "Sidney Wang" modeled after "Charlie Chan", "Sam Diamond" modeled after "Sam Spade" - and their methods of baffling their readers.
Literature
- Possibly the original solver of Locked Room Mysteries is Sherlock Holmes, perhaps most famously in The Case Of The Speckled Band
- Parodied in the Discworld short story "Theatre of Cruelty", in which Vimes's Internal Monologue brings up the complaint that "wizards made locked room mysteries commonplace" (though there are never any actual examples of this happening in the series).
- Unless we count The Fifth Elephant and the theft of the scone. Although as Vimes puts it, it is even more annoying that the room was left unlocked.
- Happens in the Finnegan Zwake series with the man in Finn and Stoppard's storage room (in Horizontal Man) and Professor Freaze in his tent (in Worm Tunnel).
- Intentionally played to the point of absurdity in the second Dirk Gently novel by Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. Dirk finds that his newest client, a wealthy man who had hired him as a security guard, had his head severed and placed on an active record machine while awaiting Dirk. Of course, the door to the room was locked from the inside when the scene was initially discovered. The police analyze this as an elaborate suicide done simply to cause trouble.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- The second Ace Attorney has a case where your assistant is locked in a room with the victim, a gunshot is heard, and the door is opened to reveal her standing over the corpse with bloodstained clothes and a smoking gun in her hand. Naturally, it now falls on you to prove her innocent in court.
- Another case involves a man found dead in a middle of a snow-covered courtyard with only one set of footprints leading to the body... and an eyewitness who saw the killer leave the murder scene by flying over the rooftops.
- An interesting inversion of this trope occurs in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion during a side mission; You and five other people are locked into a mansion on the premise that hidden somewhere in the house is a chest full of gold. Whoever finds it gets to keep it. A fun little game between friends, right? But soon, people start turning up dead, one by one, and suspicions fly as to who the killer is. Now, here's the twist; This is a Dark Brotherhood, a.k.a. Assassin's mission. YOU are the killer. The other five people are all targets, the mission is to kill them without them knowing you are the killer, and just for giggles, you're holding the only key to the front door.
- Oh, yeah, and there's no gold, either. Well, not for them, anyway.
- Unfortunately, it's programmed so badly that they never notice that you're the murder even if you do it in front of them.
- Invoked repeatedly in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, where it forms the core of the argument that the culprit must be the Golden Witch Beatrice instead of a human. Beatrice is knowledgable about the classics and goes to some lengths to rule out the obvious solutions.
Wen Resources
