"The career of the locked-room mystery in literature has been nothing short of exemplary."- Donald A. Yates ("The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet," from The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, 1956)
Earlier this week, one of my fellow locked
room enthusiasts, JJ,
wrote a scathing blog-post
about the selection of short stories from a recently published anthology, Classic
Locked Room Mysteries (2016), which was edited and compiled by David Stuart
Davies – who is primarily known as a writer of Sherlockian fiction and
Holmesian studies.
JJ dismissed the collection as both "the
laziest anthology of classic crime tales ever assembled" and as a missed
opportunity "to bring back into circulation stories that aren't readily and
easily available."
I can only agree with his criticism about
the choice of stories: the table of content resembles a well-attended reunion
of all of the obvious suspects who regularly turn up in these kinds of
anthologies. However, I've never seen them all neatly gathered in a single
volume. They're all there! The stories range from Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Jacques
Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" to Melville
Davisson Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" and G.K.
Chesterton's "The Invisible Man," but the saddest part is that all but one
of the stories are in the public domain and appeared in some fairly recent
anthologies – specifically The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and
Impossible Crimes (2000) and The Black Lizard Big of Locked Room
Mysteries (2014). It simply reeks of a quick, easy and cynical cash-grab.
JJ was right when he spoke of a missed
opportunity, because a good, historical and interesting collection could've
been cobbled together with stories from the public domain, but that would've
required a bit of work. There are a ton of locked
room yarns from the nineteenth and early twentieth century that were
swallowed by the mists of time, which would make for an interesting and even
historically important anthology. You only have to crack open and skim through
Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) to find more than enough
material for such a collection. So guess what I did?
I arranged an alternative line-up of
fifteen titles for Classic Locked Room Mysteries or a hypothetical,
non-existent anthology, called Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums,
but I've not read every single story on this list – which were picked because
they sounded interesting and were rarely or ever anthologized. And that's kind
of the point of this blog-post: pointing out the stories that have been ignored
and overlooked by anthologists for decades. I also threw in a handful of
familiar names to give this potential collection some star power.
So, without further ado, here is my shot
at being an armchair anthologist:
1. "Rhampsinitus
and the Thief" (c. 440 BC) – Herodotus
2. "The Spectre of Presburg: A Hungarian Tale"
(1818) – Anne and Annabella Plumptre
3. "The Diamond Lens" (1858) – Fitz-James
O'Brien
4. "The Black Pearl" (1888) – Victorien Sardou
5. "The Case of Roger Carboyne" (1892) – H.
Greenbough Smith
6. "The Suicide of Kiaros" (1897) – L.
Frank Baum
7. "The Story of the Lost Special" (1898)
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. "The Mystery of the Circular Chamber"
(1898) – L.T. Meade and R. Eustace
9. "The Mystery of the Locked Room"
(1905) – Tom Gallon
10. "Plague of Ghosts" (1907) – Rafael Sabatini
11. "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom"
(1907) – Jacques Futrelle
12. "The Unseen Hand" (1908) – M.
McDonnell Bodkin
13. "The Round Room Horror" (1911) – A.
Demain Grange
14. "The Mystery of Howard Romaine'' (1917) – Herbert Beerbohm Tree
15. "Flashlights"
(1918) – Laurence Clarke
As noted above, I've not read all of
these stories myself, but good, bad or dated, I think most of us would love to
explore them between the covers of a single collection of short stories. You've
to do a bit of digging to find them all, but such a book would still be
dirt-cheap to produce. And readers would not feel like they're being ripped
off.
