One of my goals is to write a good “locked room” mystery with an original solution. You know, a murder that takes place under seemingly impossible conditions. I refuse to believe all the ideas have been used up. In the meantime, here is a mammoth 7 part review of a locked room anthology that appears on a blog called Beneath the Stairs of Time
The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries was compiled by an award-winning editor, Otto Penzler, who, judging by the content page, took great care in avoiding the pitfalls of such previous anthologies as The Locked Room Reader (1968) and Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982) – covering too many over anthologized stories. There are some of those familiar stories collected here, but they’re, by and large, contained in the first portion of the book.
Familiar As the Rose In Spring deals with “the most popular and frequently reprinted impossible-stories of all-time” and serves as a 1920s-era drawing room to gather all of the usual suspects in: Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Jacques Futrelle‘s “The Problem of Cell 13,” Wilkie Collins‘ “A Terribly Strange Bed,” Melville Davisson Post‘s “The Doomdorf Mystery” and G.K. Chesterton‘s “The Invisible Man.” I have skipped these stories, but there was one I hadn’t read before.
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