Prelude to Revival: The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Novel in the 1980s

In "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime in the 21st Century," I attempted to give a brief rundown how the impossible crime genre, especially the novel-length version, went from a dormant state in 2000 to the budding revival of recent years – realizing too late that the attempt was premature and incomplete. First and foremost, I should have simply waited until 2025 as it would have given a clearer picture of recent developments and a larger sampling of this new batch of locked room specialists. I also realized too late that I unfairly brushed over the fact that the story of today's locked room revival has a not unimportant prelude. I first need to retrace my steps from the previous post.

Robert Adey wrote in the preface to Locked Room Murders (1991) that the post-WWII impossible crime novel experienced a sharp decline with John Dickson Carr being "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels." John Russell Fearn diligently carried alongside his favorite mystery writer, but his work existed in relative obscurity until recently. I pointed to the 1981 selection, "A Locked Room Library," as a perfect illustration of the rut the impossible crime novel found itself in during the second-half of the previous century.

There were, however, occasionally flareup over the decades. During the 1960s, Helen McCloy suddenly became interested in locked room puzzles and produced the superb Mr. Splitfoot (1968). Paul Gallico wrote two novels earlier in the decade in which his paranormal investigator, Alexander Hero, exposes locked room trickery behind seemingly supernatural phenomena in additional to several one-offs – like Kip Chase's Murder Most Ingenious (1962), Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and John Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966). At the time, they were the last spurts of an apparently dying genre as the only one who made a splash in the 1970s was John Sladek and his two locked room classics, Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977). The miracle crime continued to thrive in short story form in publications like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but novel-length locked room mysteries had become a niche. Then something remarkable happened.

The 1980s saw an explosion novel-length locked room and impossible crime novels, but even more remarkable is that it happened in four different countries, across three continents, under vastly different circumstances and outcomes. One of those outcomes has put its stamp on the budding locked room revival we're seeing today.

The first stop is the United States where the resurrected locked room mystery came out guns blazing. I got the idea for this eighties retrospective from an apparently unremarkable, largely forgotten mystery, Phillips Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980), which one of only three novels starring a multi-millionaire attorney, Leo Roi. Murder Behind Closed Doors turned out to be not as unremarkable as first expected as Lore valiantly tried to string together a quartet of impossible crimes. Only the solution to the first murder in the locked coach house is noteworthy, but Murder Behind Closed Doors unwittingly set the tone for the American locked room resurgence of that decade.

A year later, Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981) sends his "Nameless Detective" to San Francisco's first ever Western Pulp Con to root out a blackmailer, but ends up having to crack a tougher nut when a man is shot in a hotel room – locked from the inside. Even better is the second murder in a shed sporting one of Pronzini's most creative locked room-tricks and inspired clueing. Pronzini was only warming up. Scattershot (1982) is an interlinked short story collection and a sequel to Hoodwink following the nameless detective around during a regular working week, which turns disastrous by inexplicable disappearances, impossible thefts and a murder behind locked doors. So three in total and five all together with the previous novel, but Pronzini added one more to the tally. Bones (1985) has nameless digging into the death of a pulp writer who supposedly shot himself inside his locked office thirty years ago. I suppose a case can be made to add Shackles (1988) to the list as one plot-thread certainly can be taken a reverse locked room mystery, or locked room escape, but not everyone's going to agree.

If you add Pronzini's short stories from the period, such as "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" (1980) and "Booktaker" (1983), it's not difficult to see why his name became synonymous with the American locked room mystery with Hoodwink being his flagship impossible crime novel. However, there's another reason why Hoodwink perfectly represents this period of the American detective story/locked room mysteries. It appears that convention culture of the 1970s and '80s was a source of inspiration for some of the decades more unusual mysteries (e.g. Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun, 1987). Richard Purtill was a philosophy professor and a fantasy/science-fiction author who wrote an incredibly fun, curiously overlooked impossible crime novel, Murdercon (1982). The story takes place at a fantasy and science-fiction fan convention where two people die under bizarre, inexplicable circumstances. One victim is "zapped" to death by Darth Vader, while the other is pushed from a window by an invisible killer.

Pronzini's Hoodwink and Purtill's Murdercon form a complimentary set of locked room mysteries, which both do something differently with a somewhat similar premise. I consider them to be highlights from this period, but the best was yet to come.

Herbert Resnicow was a civil engineer, life-long reader of detective fiction and locked room fanboy who, upon an early retirement, decided to write his own detective novels and was rewarded for his debut, The Gold Solution (1983) – nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The book concerns the seemingly impossible murder of a well-known architect in his fortress-like, top floor apartment. While not the best or most original of his locked room mysteries, The Gold Solution is a blueprint for the way in which Resnicow would go on to handle the locked room problem. Resnicow drew on his engineering background to create large scale, three-dimensional locked room-tricks and produced two classics of its kind. The Gold Deadline (1984) stages an impossible stabbing in a locked, guarded theater box during a ballet performance and The Dead Room (1987) brings the locked room mystery to the dark, multi-level anechoic chamber of a hi-fi company. Impressively, the solutions are as original as their setup promises and the absence of diagrams and floor plans do not take away from the tricky solutions or confuse them. You can easily imagine the crime scene and spin them around in your mind to understand the tricks. The Gold Curse (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989) aren't bad either, but not nearly as good or original as The Gold Deadline and The Dead Room. Resnicow was at the time a much needed, innovative voice to show you can teach an old dog new tricks. A shame nobody took note of them at the time.

However, the same year The Gold Solution was published, Marcia Muller embarked on her only solo-locked room mystery, The Tree of Death (1983). Funnily enough, it takes a similar approach as the murder is committed inside a locked museum protected with burglar alarms. Another one-off worth mentioning is Ellen Godfrey's Murder Behind Locked Doors (1988) in which the server room of a data processing/software company becomes the scene of a suspicious death. And the solution is tailor made to suit the situation.

There are, of course, more examples, particular in short story form, but these are the most important, and brazen, examples. A near decade-long Fourth of July celebration after a four-decade drought, but the fireworks fizzled and died down by the time the 1990s came knocking.

Next stop is England, jolly old England, where the locked room revival of the 1980s was conducted quietly and covertly. So cloak-and-daggers instead of fanfare with fireworks. Douglas Clark is a prime example. A former executive of a pharmaceutical company and a once hugely popular mystery writer of retro-GAD mysteries, but camouflaged his plots as police procedurals with ingenious poisoning methods and medical conundrums. So quite a few of his impossible crime novels have been overlooked like Golden Rain (1980). A novel that never once acknowledges that the poisoning of a school mistress is an impossible one. Plain Sailing (1987), on the other hand, concerns the death of a man by fast acting poison alone on a boat out at sea ("one of those locked room mysteries"). Clark's best contribution remains the much earlier Death After Evensong (1969) about a man getting shot point blank by a bullet that vanishes as if by magic. I wish Clark had written more retro-GAD novels in the vein of Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing.

Someone who was more open and brazen when it came to declaring his colors was a staple of the UK library system, Roger Ormerod, which allowed him some freedom to pen traditionally-plotted mysteries. At the time, it was not a route to commercial success or getting paperback deals, but it gave fans today something to rediscover and enjoy. And how! Ormerod dabbled in impossible crime fiction before the '80s (e.g. The Weight of Evidence, 1978), but really started to make work of it with More Dead Than Alive (1980). A modern-day Harry Houdini vanishes from a tower room blocked from the inside by a heavy magician's cabinet and galore of false-solutions, which get demolished as quickly as they're proposed and the correct explanation is daringly original – rediscovered today in certain closed circles as a minor classic. Ormerod produced an indisputable classic only a few years later. Face Value (1983) is not so much a retro-GAD novel as it's a proto-type of the Japanese shin honkaku mystery, presented as a character-driven crime novel. In 1983, the whole shin honkaku movement was still in its infancy and took place behind a language barrier. Ormerod, always willing to experiment, created exactly such a type of mystery novel out of thin air! Ormerod continued to write detective novels, thrillers and locked room mysteries throughout the '80s and '90s, but none as good as Face Value. One of the best, traditionally-styled detective novels and locked room mysteries from the post-WWII period! Amazingly, the phrase locked room mystery or impossible crime is never uttered by any of the characters!!

The last Brit deserving to be highlighted here is the champion of the historical locked room mystery as imagined by John Dickson Carr and Robert van Gulik, the historian Paul Doherty. Doherty debuted in the mid-1980s with the locked room mystery Satan in St Mary's (1986) representing his first, tentative steps as Doherty would go to prolifically write historical impossible crime novels right up to this day. During the late '90s and '00s, Doherty was the only British mystery writer who made impossible crimes his specialty. Doherty's locked room mysteries are generally overlooked, because they're historical mysteries.

Across the channel, in France, Paul Halter appeared on the scene with La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) to boldly claim the mantle of John Dickson Carr. The Fourth Door is a classically-styled mystery full of bravado as a body miraculously appears inside a sealed attic room and an impossible shooting takes place in a house surrounded by a carpet of virgin snow. Halter handled both impossibilities like an expert and remember the solution to the no-footprints problem being quite original, but, similarly to Doherty, Halter wrote most of his locked room novels and short stories over the next few decades – including most of his best work. However, despite the technical nature of the locked room-trick, La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) has its admirers as does Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988). While gathering a cult audience over the years, Halter has not inspired others in his country to pick up the proverbial pen to help him revive the French Golden Age detective story of Stanislas-André Steeman, Pierre Véry, Noël Vindry and Herbert & Wyl. So, for all his devotion, Halter remained an isolated voice in the genre until his locked room novel started to get translated into multiple languages. Halter's masterpiece La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) even had an international premier as the English, Japanese and Chinese translations preceded the original French publication. Things played out a little differently in Japan.

You know the story by now. A century ago, Edogawa Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan and began to experiment with the possibilities, e.g. "Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic," 1925). That evolved into the Western inspired honkaku (orthodox) mysteries of Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi, but had to make way for Seicho Matsumoto and the post-war shakai-ha (social school) movement. The character-driven, socially conscience crime novel gained popularity during the 1950s and remained the dominant form of crime fiction for several decades. However, the 1970s saw, what's called today, the "Yokomizo Boom" in which the Kosuke Kindaichi series was rediscovered and flourished into a multi-media franchise. It ploughed the ground and planted the seeds for what was to come.

Soji Shimada's picked up where the greats of the past left off and created a blueprint for the shin honkaku (new orthodox) mystery with Senseijutsu satusjin jiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982). Unlike Halter, in France, Shimada only had to wait a few years before others took the ball from him and ran with it. Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) is generally regarded as the official beginning of the shin honkaku movement with writers like Alice Arisugawa, Takemaru Abiko, Rintaro Norizuki and many others following suit – effectively reviving the genre and bringing about a second Golden Age. A movement who completely revitalized and rejuvenated the classically-styled detective story with their college aged detectives, eccentric architecture and corpse puzzles. They have been at it ever since. During the mid-1990s, Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) and MORI Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) started the second shin honkaku wave by moving away from bizarre buildings, remote villages and isolated islands to couch the traditionally-styled plots in specialized backgrounds and subject matters. While they're at it, the likes of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989), Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) have been exploring the possibilities hybrid mysteries have to offer for a potential third wave. Why not. It's not like we're doing anything with it. Not to mention it has spread to every form of media in Japan and leaking into the main stream. Or the success of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series that's comparable only to Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie.

So they did everything right and the story doesn't end there. A century after Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan, the Japanese shin honkaku mystery is now journeying west. Just like Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders marked the beginning of the shin honkaku movement, the 2015 LRI publication of the eagerly anticipated English edition started the translation wave. More importantly, the translation wave has already began to influence the Western locked room revival. I noted before there are two very different strains of modern impossible crime fiction develop in front of our eyes. On the one hand, you have the more traditionalists, Anne van Doorn, Tom Mead, J.S. Savage and Gigi Pandian, who can be linked to the reprint renaissance. And on the other you have a group of mostly independently published writers who can be aligned to the translation wave. Such as A. Carver (The Author is Dead, 2022), K.O. Enigma (Bunraku Noir, 2023) and H.M. Faust (Gospel of V, 2023). James Scott Byrnside and Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022) fall somewhere in between. If things continue to develop along these lines, the shin honkaku-style is going to help shape the Western locked room mystery of the 21st century, nearly a century after Rampo! Sometimes history really does rhyme.

This drawn out drivel is not as coherent as imagined. The point is that the post-WWI era saw a sharp, world-wide decline in locked room mystery novels as it beat a retreat to the magazines where it continued to thrive in short story form. Even in Japan.

I noticed that Japanese locked room novels published during the reign of the social crime novel where either hidden away in historical mysteries or mostly forgotten about. For example, Sasazawa Saho's fascinating sounding Kyuukon no misshitsu (The Locked Room of the Suitors, 1978) which would have been forgotten had it not been mentioned in a famous Japanese guidebook on locked room mysteries. So this dark age persisted until the 1980s when, all of sudden, the lights went on across the world and it's not always clear why. Why and how the Japanese shin honkaku mystery subsisted and grew from a niche into a staple of Japanese crime fiction is clear enough, but no idea how it happened in the US or why it died down after barely a decade. Why did Halter remain an isolated phenomenon, but Shimada's locked room mysteries founded a whole new movement? What are the odds it happened on three different continents almost at the same time? Almost like something was hedging its bets hoping it would succeed somewhere or, more likely, an interesting combination of circumstances that happened to throw up a best case scenario in the Japanese detective story – not to mention a "what if?" situation. What if Pronzini's blending of the hardboiled narrative with actual plots and Resnicow's blueprint for large-scale locked room murders were carried over into the next decade? Could the US and by extension the West have had their second Golden Age twenty years ago with the locked room mystery as its flagship? Japan shows it's theoretically possible, but then again, they're more generous in catering to niche audiences in the hope it grows into something profitable. So maybe not. I have not forgotten about the Brits, but the traditional, fair play British detective story (impossible or otherwise) is never going to be restored to its pre-WWII status without another Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie.

So, to cut a long story short, genre history is interesting and a good excuse to mount your hobby horse to rant on about half-formed thoughts. So, hopefully, I still managed to arrive somewhere coherently and assure you the whole timeline was clear and orderly in my mind. So, beside the possibility of World War III, I'm curious to see how things are going to develop and play out over the next ten years. I think doing one of these retrospectives in 2034 has now become something to look forward to.