Locked and Loaded, Part 3: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

A while ago, I cobbled together a pair of compilation posts, "Locked and Loaded, Part 1 and 2," which discussed a devil's dozen short locked room and impossible crime stories. All enticing sounding detective stories from my favorite subgenre, but somehow eluded being absorbed into the many, well-known locked room-themed anthologies published between Hans Santesson's The Locked Room Reader (1968) and Otto Penzler's Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022). So, after nearly two years, it was time to do a third. 

Yeah, I'm well aware that after a nice period of some kind of variety, the locked rooms and impossible crimes have begun to dominate again, but the accumulated pile of locked room novels and short stories desperately needed trimming. So please be patient and you can at least look forward to a few reviews of some obscure items from Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

 

Table of Content:

Charles G. Booth's "One Shot" (1925)

Margery Allingham's "The Unseen Door" (1945)

Margery Allingham's "Tall Story" (1954)

Morton Wolson's "The Glass Room" (1957)

Joseph Commings' "Nobody Loves a Fat Man" (1980)

L.A. Taylor's "Silly Putty" (1986)

 

Charles G. Booth's "One Shot" originally appeared in the June, 1925, issue of The Black Mask and reprinted in Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). Peter Stoddard, "something of an authority on antiques," who received an offer from Nat Hammond to buy the Parsee Sunrise, "a jeweled symbol of the Parsee fire worshipers," which came with a twenty thousand dollar prize-tag. Curiously, the typewritten note had a pen-written postscript on the back reading, "don't buy the Parsee Sunrise—please." So, as a man of action, Stoddard is determined to keep the appointment, but, when he arrives at the house, he discovers Nat Hammond shot and killed inside his library – door and windows securely bolted from the inside. In fact, the whole house had been shuttered for the night. However, the solution is like a knife that cuts on both sides. It's a tremendous improvement on a very well-known, incredibly overrated, short story (ROT13: Zryivyyr Qnivffba Cbfg'f “Gur Qbbzqbes Zlfgrel”), but the solution also makes the story entirely irrelevant. You know what I mean when you read it. A curiosity instead of a genuine antique. 

Margery Allingham's short-short "The Unseen Door" was originally published in the August 5, 1945, edition of Sunday Empire News and recently reprinted in Martin Edward's anthology Capital Crimes: London Mysteries (2015). Superintendent Stanislaus Oates and Albert Campion are summoned to the Prinny's Club, Pall Mall, where the body of "the man who exposed William Merton," Robert Fenderson, was lying in the billiard room. Merton had ruined a thousand small speculators and had shouted threats, which made him an obvious suspect when he broke jail the previous night. Bowser, the doorkeeper, enjoys a perfect view from his box of the street door and swears "the only other living soul to cross the threshold was Chetty," the lame billiard marker. So how could the murderer have entered a club that had been largely closed and locked for cleaning with the only entrance under observation? The answer is as short and sweet as the story itself, befitting a detective story comprising of no more than three pages.  

In the next short story, Margery Allingham's "Tall Story," published in the April, 1954, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Divisional Detective Chief Inspector Charley Luke tells Albert Campion about the time he solved an impossible crime – which raised him from a humble constable to a member of the C.I.D. Many years ago, the police received information that 'Slacks' Washington had run out of money again and had been seen "taking sights round a little bookmaker's office in Ebury Court." So the police sets a trap that should corner Washington inside a cul-de-sac with "the stuff on him" to make "a nice clean open-and-shut case." But even the best-laid plans can go awry. A gunshot echoes from inside the trap and a dying man, who's not Washington, comes staggering out. Washington is found sitting on a packing case, casually smoking a cigarette, but not a penny of stolen money nor a smoking gun was found. Luke makes a staggering simple observation that solves the entire case and earned himself a promotion in the process. A good, simple and perfectly logical answer that fitted the circumstances. Allingham was a much better mystery writer in a short story form.  

Morton Wolson's "The Glass Room," originally appearing in the September, 1957, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is a small and sparkling gem of the detective story parody! Deputy Inspector Anthony J. Quinn is sitting at his desk ranting and raving to a mystery writer ("cop haters") about all the nonsense he reads in detective stories. He has some choice words for our favorite mysteries. Such as his take on Ellery Queen, "as if I'd let my own son stick even the end joint of his pinky into a homicide without I'd chop it off" not "to mention it is absolutely impossible to beat trained cops." Quinn also dislikes locked room mysteries and sketches a scenario that actually sounds very enticing. A room that has been "empty and sealed for a hundred years, its windows warped shut, the bolted on the door rusted solid," but, when the room is broken open, they find "a freshly knifed corpse" – minus the knife and killer. Later they locate the knife with "traces of that guy's blood on its blade" inside "a locked museum case in a city a thousand miles away" where it had been laying "untouched for ten years." Quinn provides an answer to both locked room puzzles with the sealed museum case being actually pretty descent. A trick that would work even better today than in the 1950s. So, while venting his bile over detective stories, Quinn simultaneously directing a murder investigation from behind his desk. The victim had been shot and killed while all alone in a glass phone booth with the door shut. Quinn ends up doing exactly what he accuses all those fictitious sleuths of doing, sitting back on his ass and chessing out the case. A thoroughly entertaining parody that should be considered for future anthologies!  

Joseph Comming's short-short "Nobody Loves a Fat Man," originally published in the June, 1980, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and has U.S. Senator Brooks U. Banner searching the home of a State Department official. Cicero Hill has a charge of espionage hanging over his head, but without tangible evidence to back up the accusations the case collapses. The evidence in question is "a strip of microfilm concealed inside a small plastic capsule about the size of a sleeping pill." However, the plastic pellet is nowhere to be found. Not anywhere in the house nor on (or inside) Cicero Hill. So where is it? A really short-short story and not the greatest or most challenging impossible problem Banner has been called on to explain, but the hiding place is admittedly very clever. Although one that's nigh impossible to anticipate.  

L.A. Taylor's "Silly Putty," first published in the May, 1986, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, attempts to modernize "the classic locked room of the mystery pulps." Inspector Percival Kalabash is investigating a burglary and theft of silverware from a house, but "every single door and window had been locked on the inside." Curiously, two days before the burglary, a kid had broken a window pane with a baseball and the owner called the Criminal Rehabilitation Center for a reformed handyman. But the handyman has an ironclad alibi. So how could he have done it? A well intended attempt at modernizing a classic, but the result is a very minor, half-decent and forgettable story.  

As to be expected from half a dozen, randomly picked short stories, the overall quality is a uneven, but not a truly bad one. Booth's "One Shot" is a curio, Taylor's "Silly Putty" is minor stuff and Allingham's "The Unseen Door" and Commings' "Nobody Loves a Fat Man" too short to stick with the reader, but Allingham's "Tall Story" and Worton's "The Glass Room" carried the day. A pair of excellent short stories with their own distinctly different takes on the locked room mystery. Now that I think about it, Worton's Inspector Quinn would probably like "Tall Story."