Foreword

In the Tradition of John Dickson Carr

Douglas G. Greene

Many years ago at a mystery convention in London, I chaired a panel on locked room mysteries. Among the participants was the late Bob Adey, the bibliographer of books and stories featuring locked rooms. I asked Bob why they remain so popular, and he responded, “Because a locked room always guarantees that the story features a puzzle.” And the detective story in its most fundamental incarnation is centered around the puzzle.

The locked room mystery is one type of “miracle problem,” a story in which a murder or some other crime is committed that seems humanly impossible. At its most atmospheric, as in the novels of John Dickson Carr, the reader is led to believe that the only explanation is supernatural, that the crime was committed by a witch, a demon, a vampire or some other denizen of the nether regions, until the detective steps in and shows how the murder was actually done by humans for human motives. He acts almost like an exorcist, banishing the supernatural and restoring order.

In a locked room story, a murder is committed within a room whose doors and windows are locked, sometimes even sealed, on the inside; but only the corpse is there, as the murderer seems to have vanished. And speaking of vanishing, another form of the miracle problem is the disappearance of one of the characters seemingly into thin air. Someone walks into a hallway, with observers at both the entry and the exit, but doesn’t come out. In one spectacular variation, a man dives into a swimming pool and disappears. The pool is drained and no one is there. In yet another novel, a corpse vanishes from a sealed vault. An intriguing story is based around a street that vanishes. Other variations include death by no visible cause, and a murder committed in a house surrounded by unmarked snow or sand.

It is fair to say that the miracle problem has attracted the most ingenious of all mystery writers. Indeed, it began when the detective story form itself emerged from the gothic story. The very first detective story, Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is a locked-room mystery. Half a century went by and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes a disappearing weapon problem. In 1898, L. T. Meade published A Master of Mysteries, the first short story collection dedicated entirely to miracle problems. A bit more than a decade later, in 1910, two writers emerged who specialized in seemingly impossible crimes. One, G. K. Chesterton, was a master of prose style; the other, Thomas W. Hanshew, wasn’t. Chesterton set Father Brown to investigate winged daggers, disappearing murderers and corpses, a murderous book, seemingly genuine spiritualist phenomena, family curses, and much more. And all of this in Chesterton’s paradoxical, sometimes ornate and often indirect storytelling, enlivened by Father Brown’s cryptic remarks. Also in 1910, Thomas W. Hanshew, an American dime novelist living in London created Hamilton Cleek, the Man of the Forty Faces, who has what is described as a “weird birthgift,” that is, he can writhe his features so that he can look like anyone he chooses—leading to the “Forty Faces.” Scotland Yard becomes touchingly dependent on Cleek’s ability to solve seemingly impossible crimes, and an admiring Inspector brings him cases that seem to have no rational solution. And what cases they are—locked room after locked room, impossible disappearance after impossible disappearance—including a man who vanishes while turning a somersault, and a huge statue that disappears from a locked museum, and on and on.

Chesterton and Hanshew were important not only for their own contributions to fictional impossible crimes but also for their influence on John Dickson Carr, the greatest creator of locked rooms and other miracles. Carr so admired Chesterton’s stories that he based his great detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, on Chesterton. Carr didn’t base any characters on Hanshew—no one has forty faces, and his female characters are not all that pure—but he said that, though he recognized Hanshew’s faults as a writer, the creator of Hamilton Cleek had extraordinarily imaginative ideas.

All this is leading to the book you hold in your hands. In The Hollow Man (aka, The Three Coffins), Dr. Fell stops the story to lecture on the locked room. He describes no fewer than eight methods to kill someone in an apparently locked room:

 

1. The murder is not a murder, but an accident that looks like one;
2. The murder is committed by a poison gas, which causes the victim to go into a frenzy throwing things about, thus creating the appearance of the murderer having been in the room;
3. The murder is achieved by a mechanical trap;
4. It is a suicide which is set up to look like murder;
5. After committing the killing and leaving the room, the killer impersonates the victim, thus confusing who is in the room when the crime is done;
6. The murderer has left his victim unconscious (stunned or drugged), and left the room. He is the first one back into the room and commits the murder at that time;
7. The murderer commits the crime from outside the locked room by means of having frozen ice pellets, an icicle or similar, shot through a window or some other opening;
8. The room has been locked from the outside by a string or some other device.

 

In an imaginative touch Gigi Pandian has invented a series of miracle crimes, each one of which uses one of Dr. Fell’s methods. And like Carr she often creates a spooky supernatural atmosphere, with the presence of magic pervading several of the stories.

You have much to look forward to.

 

—Douglas G. Greene