In Britain and America, there are entire television channels devoted to police procedurals and whodunnits, and in bookshops across the world, fictional detective stories are snapped up in their millions. For many of the real-life detectives of Scotland Yard, these colourful yarns will have been a source of childhood fascination. How many would-be recruits were inspired by these fictional yet exciting depictions of bravery and ingenuity? Which heroic fictional detectives have become role models? And what happens when the border between fiction and reality is blurred?
The puzzles in this section reflect that occasionally curious crossover between truth and fiction, where real-life cases inspire films and novels, and where fiction inspires the real-life detectives of Scotland Yard; in particular, an intriguing selection of Locked Room mysteries drawn from vintage (and sometimes long-forgotten) detective novels.
In terms of giving shape to the reading public’s idea of what a detective should be like, author Edgar Allen Poe led the way with his French sleuth August Dupin, who solved ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and the affair of ‘The Purloined Letter’ in the 1840s. Dupin was detached and very slightly otherworldly; traits that would later appear in many other fictional detectives.
There was an even more rounded fictional figure, several years later, the inspiration for whom was very firmly rooted in reality. Inspector Bucket, who moves through the pages of Charles Dickens’s 1852 novel Bleak House, is engaging yet enigmatic, benign yet ever-watchful, electrically intelligent and yet tirelessly patient when his investigations take a wrong turn. Bleak House itself cannot be described as a whodunnit. The story of never-ending legal conflict and families with long-buried secrets goes far beyond that. But in it, Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of a character called Tulkinghorn. And his progress through this foggy, murky investigation takes him from the refined drawing rooms of titled aristocrats to the reeking slum of Tom-All-Alone’s. Bucket is ‘a sharp-eyed man in black’, middle-aged, and with a noticeably prominent and plump forefinger, which he waves around in the air for emphasis at crucial moments in the story.
Bucket is a character who is able to move between all strata of society but there is something uncanny about his ubiquity. Sometimes he appears in rooms without any of the other characters being aware of him. He looks at people with an unnerving closeness and steadiness. And he specialises in wrong-footing those he is interested in, on one occasion attending a cheerful birthday party and giving a rendition of a hearty song, before changing his tune and arresting one of the guests. Inspector Bucket also uses one of the best-loved set-pieces of the fictional detective–seeming to have no more questions to ask the grand Sir Leicester Dedlock, he thanks him for his time, making to leave the room–only to turn at the door with one more piercing enquiry. This is a seemingly offhand observation about a reward poster that then leads to the Inspector pursuing a fresh possibility and a fruitful conversation with a footman bringing him closer to the truth.
One of fiction’s first detectives, Bucket illustrated the philosophical possibilities of the role: whether lurking unobtrusively in the background, or leaping forward and taking the lead with gusto, he is always there to interpret an entire world, including its grim mysteries. He is there to see the threads that bind an interminable Court of Chancery case to long-buried family secrets. He is there to define what is deceitful and what is true. Charles Dickens was thought to have based Inspector Bucket upon Charles Frederick Field, a real Scotland Yard detective whose previously mentioned career proved a source of unending fascination. Bucket is also imbued with a sharp wit deployed against social superiors; and it is tempting to think that Dickens’s admiration of Field extended to this element of detective work. That is, the man of humble origins not only moving through the salons of elegant society, but also–by virtue of his authority–commanding its attention and, indeed, obedience. Certainly in the decades to follow the archetype of the slightly eccentric, anti-establishment detective–from Father Brown to Columbo–would prove very popular.
Bucket is a figure who can plunge into impenetrable physical and metaphorical fogs and find his way through to the truth, guiding others along the way. Another rightly famed Victorian fictional detective is Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, who pursues the thief of an exquisite stolen diamond in The Moonstone, published in 1868. Here was another crossover from reality to fiction as Cuff was thought to be based on Scotland Yard’s very own (and previously mentioned) Inspector Whicher.
Despite nineteenth-century crime fiction being regularly inspired by real life, it leapt far ahead of reality when it came to gender equality. Andrew Forrester’s volume The Female Detective was published in 1864 and across seven short mysteries, a lady known to all only as ‘G’ (although her name is revealed as Miss Gladden) is assigned to cases by a baffled Scotland Yard. This was fifty years before women were even allowed to work in Voluntary Women’s Patrols at the Yard. Even more sensational was the arrival a few months later of Mrs Paschal, a widow lending her services to the Yard, in Revelations of a Lady Detective written by William Stephens Hayward.
Mrs Paschal was a dynamic figure. She immersed herself in gothic mysteries involving nuns, investigated countesses with suspicious wealth and risked her own life to infiltrate secret societies. Mrs Paschal’s ability to draw the reader into exciting situations of jeopardy, and to thrill with cases that were both colourful and baroque, must surely have put down markers for many fictional detectives to come.
By the twentieth century, detective fiction was so ubiquitous that real-life cases were being presented by newspapers in the sensationalist style of fiction, accompanied by action-packed graphics. Heists aimed at jewellery shops and banks were illustrated with artistic representations of black cars driving off at speed, and in the immediate post-war years there were even some (rare) London shoot-outs that when depicted in black and white artwork gave the city a flavour of downtown Chicago. Robert Fabian had a regular newspaper slot which was often illustrated with dramatic line drawings of hoodlums diving into getaway vans or of the grim faces of killers peering out from behind bars.
While real life was treated as melodrama, some fictional police stories became markedly more realistic. In the 1950s, novelist John Creasey wrote a number of novels centring on Scotland Yard’s Commander George Gideon. This figure, looming of frame, soft of voice, was faced with an array of different crimes; everything from sinister murders to racehorse fixing to runaway children to a band of intellectual nihilist thugs. Creasey also gave Gideon a family life, something rarely, if ever, seen in police dramas. Since Gideon was a determinedly hands-on officer, there was always the sharp tension between moments of sweaty jeopardy–with shotgun-wielding gang members or a tormented scientist with a homemade bomb–and the glimpses of Gideon’s domestic life. His wife was patient but sometimes anxious, and the smaller of his children were perennially fascinated by the cases he solved. Gideon’s strength was his understanding of human nature built up over many decades on the job. He had the ability to judge who was truly dangerous, and who might be rehabilitated. Scotland Yard as an institution was also portrayed as having an aim–through its meticulously kept records, its array of experts and its patrols of decent young constables–of a benevolent omniscience. The Yard would protect the innocent, wherever they were, from the predations of wrong-doers. George Gideon was tough but realistic, a great source of inspiration for future Yard detectives.
At the other end of the spectrum is poor Inspector Lestrade, a ‘sallow-faced’ man doomed to remain a hundred steps behind fiction’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. And, of course, the eternal popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories means that this most unflattering depiction of Scotland Yard is endlessly reiterated. Thankfully, though, Lestrade’s character was handsomely rehabilitated in a recent modern-day television adaptation. As imagined by Steven Moffatt, Lestrade (played by Rupert Graves) is no longer a hapless character, but a decent public servant who stands up for Holmes when others find his selfish genius too much to take. This Scotland Yard operative is taken for a fool but is actually an active participant in some of Sherlock’s more baroque adventures; always exasperated but clever enough to see that Holmes’s preternatural gifts repay the faith Lestrade has in him.
At the more serious, thoughtful end of the crime genre is an enduring figure created by P. D. James. Adam Dalgliesh, who stands as the best advertisement in fiction for Scotland Yard, is the detective who features in fourteen of her novels. Dalgliesh not only writes poetry, he has had his poetry published. Intelligence and sensitivity combine to brilliant effect in his character. Indeed, P. D. James said straightforwardly of her creation that ‘I simply produced the kind of hero I’d like to read about; courageous but not foolhardy, compassionate but not sentimental’. And there is every chance that P. D. James’s approach to the entire business of detective stories helped act as a recruitment sergeant for the real Scotland Yard. Whodunnits from earlier years tended to be more focused on the puzzle of the murder, rather than the characters, whereas James was aiming for more psychological realism. ‘From the start, I felt that what I was doing was examining human beings under the strain of an investigation for murder’, she told the Guardian in 2011. ‘And such an investigation tears down all the walls of privacy that we build around ourselves and reveals us for who we are’.
Understanding the darker corners of human nature without letting the knowledge sour their general view of humanity is the idealised virtue of fictional detectives but their real-life counterparts were always under pressure to exhibit these same qualities themselves. And often, qualities of fictional detectives are impossible to replicate in reality. Scotland Yard detectives in real life must face the gruesome, the horrible and the fearful every day, without the benefit of plot devices and rewrites.
The current popularity of detective fiction, in print and on television, suggests that the public is always eager to hear more of the stresses, as well as the triumphs, of crime-fighting. We all like to imagine that–like Hercule Poirot or Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsy–amateurs like ourselves can navigate the complex labyrinths of murder investigations. The puzzles here are directly about the challenge that authors have thrown open to their millions of readers: the delightful game of collusion that has come to be known as the Locked Room mystery.
THE FINEST LOCKED ROOM MYSTERIES
Here are puzzles that real-life Scotland Yard detectives would have relished tackling in their spare time over the years. Fictional murder has often walked along the borders of the fantastical and so many mysteries have been tinged with suggestions of the uncanny and the supernatural. But perhaps what these conundrums have in common with real life is that the detectives are there to ground us with empirical evidence.
The Locked Room mystery is a category of detective story that has intrigued and inspired writers from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie. These seemingly impossible riddles where corpses are found in rooms locked from the inside come in the most astonishing variety and are ceaselessly ingenious. But the very conscious game being played with readers is also a reminder of what real-life detectives do: they look at the fragments of a problem, the disparate elements that are not immediately obvious, and from these strands of inchoate information they assemble a world in which rationality is restored.
There is philosophy here: no problem is insoluble. So the puzzles in this section are ten of the finest vintage Locked Room mysteries. A note: the answers at the back will naturally contain spoilers, so those who do not wish to know the solution to some of the stories here might prefer to get a hold of the books themselves!
MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
by Edgar Allen Poe
It is reasonable to claim that the mid-nineteenth-century American master of the macabre popularised the hugely enjoyable Locked Room murder mystery genre. In this short story from 1841, the scenario is as follows…
A mother and daughter have been gruesomely murdered at their apartment, several storeys up, in the Rue Morgue, Paris. The mother’s body–almost decapitated–has been taken from the apartment and is found in the back yard of the building. Meanwhile, her daughter is discovered strangled, and weirdly stuffed up inside the apartment chimney. The room in which these murders occurred was–naturally–still locked from the inside. The clues, as examined by the detective Dupin, are these: a bag of gold coins; several tufts of grey hair; a bloodied razor blade; and curious conversations overheard by neighbours, seemingly from within the room, at around the time of the murders. The conversations seemed to be two men talking; one in French, the other in a wholly unknown language. What could have prompted such crazed murders? Why these two women? Who were the talking men, and what did their discussion portend?
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The creator of Sherlock Holmes delighted in adding layers of intricacy and sharp-eyed detail to the genre: rooting the fantastical and the bizarre in realistically depicted Victorian London streets, suburban villas and Home Counties country houses. Here was one of his most fondly received head-scratchers…
Helen Stoner is in fear for her life; and more particularly, she is frightened by her stepfather Dr Roylott. Since the death of her mother, and her twin sister, Helen has been living with Dr Roylott at a smart mansion in Surrey; she engages Holmes and tells him of the sinister circumstances of her twin sister’s death. The sister died two weeks before she was to be married, and her last desperate words to Helen were: ‘The Speckled Band’!
Dr Roylott is having the large house renovated; and this necessitates Helen Stoner having to move into the room once occupied by her late sister. Holmes and Watson inspect it and make various curious discoveries: the cord used for summoning servants does not work; the bed is fixed firmly to the floor; and there is a ventilator hole that passes from this room through to the bedchamber of Dr Roylott. No matter how securely locked this room will be, nothing, it seems, can stop death entering… but how?
THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES
by John Dickson Carr
A castle in the Highlands of Scotland, a tower and a life insurance policy that will not pay out if the insured party has killed himself. John Dickson Carr specialised in Locked Room mysteries and this is considered by many to be one of his most entertaining, with flashes of black comedy peppering the sinister mystery. The room this time is the bedroom at the top of the tower in the Castle of Shira. It can only be reached by means of a spiral staircase. There are no secret passages. Alex Campbell is the insured party whose body is found at the rocky base of that tower; and if the tragedy is proven to be suicide, there will be no money for the beneficiaries of his will. But if he was pushed out of the window, from a room with a locked door, how did the murderer do it? A collapsible wire animal cage is found under the bed; and there is also a suggestion that the ghost of a mutilated Highlander roams abroad. On top of this, another character decides to spend the night in the room to see if there is something preternatural going on and is in turn found next morning at the base of the tower, severely injured. Once again, the window was open and the door was locked from the inside… The key to the mystery lies in atmosphere–in more ways than one!
THE BIG BOW MYSTERY
by Israel Zangwill
Published in 1892–and serialised daily in one of the more lurid newspapers–this was one of the first full length Locked Room murder mysteries. Set in London’s East End, just several years after the Ripper murders, it is packed with juicy social detail as well as some fine dark humour. And because of its episodic nature, readers wrote in with ingenious theories even as the tale was unfolding…
A young man–Arthur Constant–lives in a boarding house run by Mrs Drabdump. One morning, she cannot wake him, and his door is locked, with the key still in the lock on the inside; she has a premonition of the worst and calls for the aid of a neighbouring retired detective. Together they force the door, and the detective advises the landlady to look away from the horror.
The young man is in his bed–but as Mrs Drabdump, after a few moments, peers fearfully, she sees that his throat has been cut from ear to ear. The windows are secure; and there is no sign of a murder weapon anywhere in the room. As news spreads, so too do the theories, including that of suicide. But if that is the case, then there should be a bloodied blade. Such an item is conspicuous by its absence.
This is a case that comes to encompass suspects galore, and walk-on parts from dockworkers to William Gladstone. Who could have hated this apparently blameless young man so much? But more: how the Dickens did the killer get in; and where then did the fatal blade go? The key to the mystery is time.
THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM
by Gaston Leroux
From the author of Phantom of the Opera came a classic Locked Room mystery in 1907 that was admired by Agatha Christie among others. A grand chateau; a scientist working on theories of ‘the dissociation of matter’, making solid objects disappear; his daughter, whose bedchamber, the ‘Yellow Room’, is adjacent to his laboratory; and that daughter being heard to scream, and then being found close to death, with the door locked on the inside and the window securely barred.
How could the putative assassin have escaped–and with such speed? As the mystery deepens, the detective and his rival investigator, a journalist, are at the Chateau as further attacks happen, but they appear to be faced with a vanishing assassin, who can disappear into thin air at any sign of pursuit.
Leroux provided diagrams and maps of the Chateau for his readers; could the would-be killer really be linked to the ‘dissociation of matter’ itself? But the key to the mystery is more to do with perception than matter itself…
THE ABSENCE OF MR GLASS
by G.K. Chesterton
A lighter-hearted Locked Room conundrum, set in Yorkshire, which pits the clerical detective Father Brown against a baroque assailant. The set-up: young James Todhunter is romancing Maggie McNab. They are to be married; but there is a secret that Todhunter–who lives in an upstairs room in a boarding house–is keeping from his love. He frequently keeps his bedroom door firmly locked. On previous nights, Todhunter has been heard through the door of his room having angry words with a mystery visitor called Mr Glass. No one has ever seen this gentleman entering or leaving but Maggie, listening intently through the door, has previously heard Todhunter utter this man’s name.
Now Maggie calls for the priest in a panic because she has heard sounds of violence within the room. They break down the door and find Todhunter alive but tied up in a corner. There is no one with him, but the priest sees a discarded top hat and several smashed tumblers of whiskey.
Who then is the sinister Mr Glass and how has he vanished into thin air? In this conundrum, the shattered tumblers are key.
SO LONG AT THE FAIR
by Anthony Thorne
A twist to the genre: a baffling mystery set in Paris, 1889, at the time of the city’s Great Exhibition. Vicky has travelled to France from England with her brother Johnny; they book into their hotel, and despite the fact that her brother is tired, Vicky insists they go to see Montmartre.
Upon returning to the hotel, Vicky goes up to her room, leaving her brother downstairs having a final nightcap. Whilst drinking, Johnny gets into a conversation with two other English guests.
In the morning, Vicky rises, goes to her brother’s room, but rather than being locked, the room is no longer there!
Where the door was, there is simply blank wall. Bewildered, Vicky goes to reception and the staff are mystified by her mention of a room number that isn’t used. Not only that, they absolutely deny having booked her brother in the previous evening. She cannot find anyone to confirm that her brother even existed.
No one has ever seen this ‘Johnny’; and the room is a room that never was. But the key to this sinister puzzle lies in Johnny’s tiredness that previous evening…
THE MIRACLE OF MOON CRESCENT
by G.K. Chesterton
Another classic head-scratcher for Father Brown, this time in America, where he faces not just a locked room but a mysteriously transported corpse. Warren Wynd is the millionaire victim in question. And the set-up involves the priest and several others waiting outside the man’s office one evening on the second floor of his premises in Moon Crescent, a curving terrace.
The mystery begins with a sharp bang from outside: someone down below at the back of the building has fired some kind of shot.
And after those initial moments of confusion, there is the realisation that Wynd has been locked away in his office for longer than expected. The door is duly broken in–but the millionaire has vanished.
It is only when Father Brown and his acquaintances are later walking around the grounds of Moon Crescent in the darkness when they see a tree with what appears to be a broken branch. But it is no branch: it is in fact the hanging body of the millionaire, with a noose around his neck. But what on earth happened between him sitting in a locked room at his desk, and ending up in those branches? The key to this murder mystery lies in the perils of looking down…
THE NAME OF THE ROSE
by Umberto Eco
A spectacular literary tribute to the art of both detection and detectives is this richly atmospheric thriller set in a medieval monastery in Italy in the twelfth century. Here, a Franciscan monk from England, Brother William of Baskerville, has been called in by the Abbott to solve the mystery of a young scribe found dead; and almost as soon as he arrives, the bodies begin piling up around the monastery, and the murders seem to have an apocalyptic theme. Do they really signify that the End of Days is approaching?
There is also a Locked Room mystery: the monastery has an ancient library, a vast tower on the edge of a sheer cliff. This library has been constructed as a treacherous labyrinth to frighten away the uninitiated. Deep within is a room with no apparent door, but a window facing out over the sheer cliff. Where there should be a door to this room is instead a mirror that shows frightening illusions of phantoms.
However, for anyone who does somehow find their way in, this locked room contains a book that kills. Anyone perusing its forbidden contents are, like cursed people, doomed to die violently soon afterwards.
The word ‘Quatuor’ written over the non-existent door comes with a clue from one such dying victim who found a way in: ‘The hand over the idol works on the first and seventh of the four’… In this locked room, how can a simple book bring death upon those who read it?
CRIME IN NOBODY’S ROOM
by John Dickson Carr
A block of flats in Chelsea, London, 1938; a young tenant, Ronald Denham, back from a boozy night out, goes up to his floor. In his drunkenness, he opens the door, walks into the flat, and it takes him a moment to woozily wonder if he has somehow got the wrong apartment.
The furnishings are different from his own–oriental lampshades, a large painting in sepia–plus there is also the murdered body of an old man sitting in a chair. For some reason, the corpse is wearing a beige raincoat inside out so that the coat’s green lining is on the outside.
Denham is then knocked out with a cosh… And when he comes to in the communal corridor outside that floor of apartments, his neighbours are perplexed. The flat he described does not exist!
But the corpse that he described does. The old man’s stabbed body is subsequently found in the lift. He was a property developer, and known to several of the neighbours…
Colonel March of Scotland Yard’s ‘Department of Queer Complaints’ is on the case. How to explain the flat that isn’t there? And who among the tenants committed this most ingenious crime? The key to it all, the Colonel realises, is that the killer is colour blind…