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Locked Room
The "locked-room" or "impossible crime" mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which a crime (almost always murder) is committed in circumstances under which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of the crime scene.[1] The crime in question typically involves a crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left, for example: a victim found deceased in a windowless room that is sealed from the inside at the time of discovery. Following other conventions of classic detective
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“
I am entirely at your service, Sir Henry. And I feel sure you will have no reason to complain of my frankness.'
H.M. blinked. 'Uh-huh. I was afraid of that.
Son, frankness is a virtue only when you're talkin' about yourself, and then it's a nuisance.
Besides, it's an impossibility. There's only one kind of person who's ever really willing to tell the truth about himself, and that's the kind they certify and shove in the bug-house. And when a person says he intends to be frank about other people,
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In an extraordinarily bold move, Carr allows Fell in chapter seventeen [in, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (1935)] to address the reader directly, giving a disquisition on the lockedroom mystery that has often been reprinted as an essay on the subject: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not . . . Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuit possible to characters in a book . . . When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more int
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― The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books
― The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books
