Help Miriam Solve The Locked-Room Murder Mystery

Miriam herself will tell you that solving the murder of that sailor was the most baffling case of her career: “He couldn’t have died from any natural cause, but suicide and murder were also out of the question. I had no explanation until I mixed in some intuition with the facts.”

A locked-room mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which a crime, almost always murder, is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. In other words, the perpetrator could not have committed the crime nor gotten in or out of the crime scene. The typical but not necessary example is a locked room. The reader is presented with the puzzle and all of the clues and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the detective.

In 1981, John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, was voted the “master of the locked-room mystery” for his 1935 novel, The Three Coffins [aka The Hollow Man]. There are, however, many other great stories in this subgenre.