Locked Room Puzzles (1986) edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini

So, back in May, I added "The Locked Library," a companion page to "The Muniment Room," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes" – essentially doubles as my version of "99 Novels for a Locked Room Library." I kind of forgot to post a short blog update to draw everyone's attention to the new page and there has been a lull of impossible crime reviews this month. No opportunity to mention it in passing. That oversight has been corrected and now onto the next.

Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) was the last impossible crime novel to be reviewed on this blog with not even short locked room mystery story between then and now. A whole month with only a single locked room mystery reviewed! I've no idea what came over me, but was determined to close out this month some impossible crimes.

I decided to take this opportunity to finally reread Locked Room Puzzles (1986), edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, which is the third of five themed mini-anthologies in the Academy Mystery Novellas series. Locked Room Puzzles was my second ever, locked room-themed anthology after Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) that gave me a rare John Dickson Carr novella and second stories for Edward D. Hoch, Bill Pronzini and Clayton Rawson – whom I all read for the first time in Ashley's anthology. So thought it was time to give Locked Room Puzzles a second read.

The first, of four, novellas is John Dickson Carr's "The Third Bullet," originally published (as by "Carter Dickson") in 1937, but this shortened version appeared in the January, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "The Third Bullet" features a rare, one-shot detective character, Colonel Marquis, who's the Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and prototype character of Colonel March from The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Note a similar one-shot detective starred in one of Carr and Val Gielgud's stage play, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944). Colonel Marquis and his subordinate, Inspector Page, confront a murder as confusingly impossible as any of the case brought Colonel March's Department D-3 at Scotland Yard.

Mr. Justice Charles Mortlake, recently retired, was a so-called red judge presiding over "serious offenses like murder or manslaughter," but the liberal judge was well-known for his leniency on the bench. However, Justice Mortlake was surprisingly hard on a man, named Gabriel White, who got "fifteen strokes of the cat and eighteen months' hard labor for robbery with violence" – despite it being his first offense based on shaky evidence. White didn't take the sentencing, nor the flogging very well and threatened the judge, which he kept up even after being released. White apparently kept his word, entered the judge's guarded house and shot him inside his private pavilion practically in front of two policemen. Even admitting to having fired one of the shots, but a shot, he says, completely missed Mortlake. A second gun is discovered hidden inside the pavilion, but then the autopsy reveals the bullet came from a third, yet to be discovered gun. That makes the whole mess a total impossibility, because "out of four sides of a square, one was a blank wall, one was impregnable with rusted bolts, and the other two were watched." So nobody, except White, could have shot Mortlake inside that locked and guarded pavilion, but he appears to be innocent. Who did it and how?

I guess whittling down "The Third Bullet" from a novel to a novella has come at the cost of Carr's normally cavalier clueing, but nonetheless enjoyed this competently put together little locked room puzzle. While not as strongly clued as a top-tier Carr, "The Third Bullet" demonstrates his talent for misdirection and muddying the waters without muddying the story or plot. So, of course, the Merrivalean blinkin' cussedness of things has a big sway over the plot making the simple and straightforward look labyrinthine. All perfectly handled by Colonel Marquis and Inspector Page. So the only thing that can really be said against "The Third Bullet" is that Carr has written better locked room mysteries, because of course he has.

The second story is Bill Pronzini's "Booktaker," plucked from the short story collection Casefile (1983), which finds the Nameless Detective in his brand new, Dumm Street office when a client comes knocking, John Rothman – owner of San Francisco's largest secondhand bookshop. A three-story building crammed with everything from "reading copies of popular fiction and nonfiction to antiquarian books, prints and the like," but someone has been helping themselves to rare books, etchings, prints and old maps locked away in the third-floor Antiquarian Room. A room that's always kept locked with only Rothman and two employees having keys ("...out of bounds to customers..."). The room is also protected by an electronic gateway that triggers an alarm if anyone tries to leave the room with an item that wasn't scanned and cleared. Somehow, it barely slowed down the thief and Rothman suspects an inside job.

Nameless gets hired to go undercover at the bookstore under the ever so subtle alias of Jim Marlowe ("...in honor of Raymond Chandler") and root out the thief. And rooting around his does. More than enough rooting and digging to make the thief nervous enough to do something really stupid and short sighted, but too late as Nameless already figured out who and how of behind the impossible thefts. "Booktaker" is one of a dozen novels and short stories Pronzini contributed to that mysterious, short-lived locked room revival from the 1980s and one of my favorites from this series. Not only has it a great and surprising premise for a hardboiled detective story with a solution as clever as it's simple, but it has a fantastic example of a red herring doubling as a clue (SPOILER/ROT13: jul gur guvrs unq gb tb sebz fgrnyvat ener obbxf gb inyhnoyr zncf vf obgu n terng pyhr naq na rssrpgvir fzbxr fperra). So, yes, this one more than stood up to another, long overdue reread.

The third story is Clayton Rawson's "From Another World," originally published in the June, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in which Ross Harte visits the Great Merlini hoping to learn something about ESP and PK. Harte is writing a magazine article on Extra Sensory Perception and shortly has to interview a millionaire, Andrew Drake, who wants to invest millions of dollars into psychic research – if he can be convinced. So a demonstration is planned between Drake and a well-known medium, Rosa Rhys. Merlini smells trouble when he hears her name and when they arrive at Drake's home, they're met by Dr. Garrett, who had just arrived following a distressed phone call from Drake. Rosa Rhys and Drake had locked and sealed themselves away in his private office for their ESP experiment, but they give response to their knocking. So they break down the door to find Rosa knocked unconscious and Drake dead from a stab wound. The door and windows were not only securely locked from the inside, but sealed was not only tightly locked from the inside, but the door was sealed with gummed paper tape!

"From Another World" is a fairly well-known, often anthologized story and not entirely without reason. Rawson came up with a good and original locked room-trick to explain that tricky conundrum of the so-called tape sealed room, however, it was pointed out a few years ago it has a giant, gaping plot hole I missed the first two times. Now that it has been pointed out and reading back my review of The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective (1979), "From Another World" definitely has lost some of its former prestige. I still liked the idea behind the locked room-trick.

Finally, Edward D. Hoch's "Day of the Wizard," originally published in the August, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, mixes exotic adventure, impossible mysteries and Cold War intrigue in Egypt. The US government desperately needs Simon Ark to help them track down the wreck of a plane, carrying a highly secret and sensitive cargo, which crashed somewhere in the desert at the end of World War II. So they ask Ark's friend and his nameless narrator to track the ancient detective down, presumably somewhere in Cairo. Our narrator has the luminous idea to ask a local magician, the Wizard, to issue an open challenge to Simon Ark to solve his most miraculous of magic tricks ("you get the publicity and I find Simon").

The Wizard agrees and asks him to buy a good, strong and reliable padlock to securely lock an empty cabinet. The door is closed, the padlock snapped into place and the keyhole plugged with a matchstick ("...broke off flush with the surface of the lock...") – sealed with drops of candle wax. The Wizard then asks what should appear inside the locked and sealed closet when they open it the next day ("the most beautiful girl in Cairo"). Simon Ark turns up before the closet is unsealed, but when it's opened, the problems really begin. A drugged, unconscious woman is found lying at the bottom of the closet followed by a murder and a track through the desert to hunt for the wrecked airplane and its mysterious cargo. Rest assured, "Day of the Wizard" is better and more consistent than my description perhaps suggests. Hoch expertly strung together the miraculous appearance of the girl in the closet and the murder with the hunt for the lost airplane and it's highly sensitive cargo, even throwing in an impossible disappearance during a brief desert sandstorm ("...vanished now as completely as if the sand had swallowed her up"). And played more than fairly with the reader. That makes for a very attractive, slightly unusual story and a highlight of the Simon Ark series. I agree with Mike Grost that this is "one of Hoch's most Carr-like stories."

Historically, "Day of the Wizard" is a fascinating and not wholly unimportant contribution to the locked room mystery simply on account of the padlock. I commented in the past you rarely ever see padlocks being used in locked room mysteries, because they're notoriously unreliable and easy to pick open. So it really difficult to pull off a convincing impossible crime scenario when the only thing keeping the door locked is a simple padlock. Hoch picked up the challenge like Carr and Rawson tackled the problem of the tape-sealed room to deliver the most definitive padlock-trick. Great stuff!

Greenberg and Pronzini's Locked Room Puzzles is perhaps not the greatest or most exciting locked room anthology you can get your hands on today, it's still a great starter anthology for those new to the wondrous world of impossible crimes and locked room murders. Locked Room Puzzles gives you an obscure John Dickson Carr novella, Rawson's famous take on the tape-sealed room and two gems from Hoch and Pronzini. So a must-have for everyone who wants to build their own locked room library.