Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries, page 1
OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS
AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS
GOLDEN AGE
LOCKED ROOM
MYSTERIES
OTTO PENZLER, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975); MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.
GOLDEN AGE
LOCKED ROOM
MYSTERIES
OTTO
PENZLER,
EDITOR
AMERICAN
MYSTERY
CLASSICS
Penzler Publishers
New York
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ANTHONY BOUCHER
Elsewhen
FREDRIC BROWN
Whistler’s Murder
JOHN DICKSON CARR
The Third Bullet
JOSEPH COMMINGS
Fingerprint Ghost
MIGNON G. EBERHART
The Calico Dog
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER
The Exact Opposite
MACKINLAY KANTOR
The Light at Three O’Clock
C. DALY KING
The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem
STUART PALMER
The Riddle of the Yellow Canary
ELLERY QUEEN
The House of Haunts
CLAYTON RAWSON
Off the Face of the Earth
CRAIG RICE
His Heart Could Break
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Murder Among Magicians
CORNELL WOOLRICH
Murder at the Automat
INTRODUCTION
Among aficionados of detective fiction, the term “locked room mystery” has become an inaccurate but useful catchall phrase meaning the telling of a crime that appears to be impossible. The story does not require a hermetically sealed chamber so much as a location with an utterly inaccessible murder victim. A bludgeoned, stabbed, or strangled body in the center of pristine snow or sand is just as baffling a location as a lone figure on a boat at sea, a solo airplane, or the classic locked room.
Like so much else in the world of mystery fiction, readers are indebted to Edgar Allan Poe for the invention of the locked room mystery, which happened to be the startling core of the first pure detective story ever written, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” initially published in the April 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine. In this ground-breaking tale, two women are heard to be screaming and a group of neighbors race up the stairs to their apartment. They break down the locked door, the key still in the lock on the inside, to find the savagely murdered mother and daughter. The windows are closed and fastened, egress through the fireplace chimney impassable, and no loose floorboards or secret passages. Of course, the police are baffled (just as readers were then, and continue to be today, a hundred and seventy years after its original appearance). Only the detective, C. Auguste Dupin, sees the solution, establishing another of the mainstays of the detective story: the brilliant amateur (often replaced in later stories by the private eye) who is smarter than both the criminal and the official police.
The locked room mystery, or impossible crime story, is the ultimate manifestation of the cerebral detective story. It fascinates the reader in precisely the same way that a magician is able to bring wonderment to his audience. What he demonstrates appears to be impossible. After all, young ladies, no matter how attractive and scantily clad, don’t just disappear, or turn into tigers, or get sawed in half. Yet we have just seen it happen, right before our very focused eyes.
Be warned. As you read these astoundingly inventive stories, you will inevitably be disappointed, just as explanations of stage illusions exterminate the spell of magic that we experienced as we watched the impossible occur. Impossible crimes cannot be impossible, as the detective will quickly point out, because they have happened. Treasure has been stolen from a locked and guarded room or museum or library, in spite of the constant surveillance by trained policemen. A frightened victim-to-be has locked, bolted, and sealed his home because the murderer has warned him that he will die at midnight, and a brigade of officers in a cordon surrounding the house cannot prevent it.
If the mind of a diabolical genius can invent a method of robbery or murder that appears to be insoluble, then surely there must be a mind of equal brilliance that is able to penetrate the scheme and explain its every nuance. That is the detective’s role and, although he appears to be explaining it all to the police and other interested parties, he is, of course, describing the scenario to the reader. The curtain that has masked the magic, that has screened the illusion, is raised, and all returns to ordinary mechanics, physics, and psychology—the stuff of everyday life.
Therefore, if you want to maintain the beauty of a magic show, refuse to listen to a magician who is willing to explain how he performed his illusion. Similarly, if the situations in these locked room mysteries have provided a delicious frisson of wonder, stop reading them as soon as you reach the denouement.
No, of course you can’t do that. It is human nature to want to know, and the moment of clarity, when all is revealed, brings a different kind of satisfaction. Admiration replaces awe. The legerdemain achieved by the authors of the stories in this volume is, to use a word that has sadly become cheapened by overuse, awesome.
While it is true that Poe invented the locked room story (although Robert Adey, in the introduction to his monumental bibliography, Locked Room Murders, gives credit to a pioneering effort by the great Irish novelist Sheridan Le Fanu, claiming the honor of first story for “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” which appeared in the November 1838 issue of Dublin University Magazine and was later reprinted in the posthumously published The Purcell Papers in 1880), there can be no argument that the greatest practitioner of this demanding form was John Dickson Carr.
Not only did Carr produce 126 novels, short stories, and radio plays under his own name and as Carter Dickson, but the range of seemingly impossible murder methods he created was so broad and varied that it simply freezes the brain to contemplate. In perhaps the most arrogant display of his command of the locked room mystery, he has his series detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, deliver a lecture to a captivated audience in his 1935 novel The Three Coffins (published in England as The Hollow Man). In this display of erudition, Fell spends fifteen pages enumerating all the ways in which a locked room does not turn out to be impenetrable after all, and in which the impossible is clearly explained. He offers scores of ideas for solutions to the most challenging puzzles in the mystery genre, tossing off in rapid succession a greater cornucopia of invention than most mystery writers will conceive in a lifetime. When he has concluded his seemingly comprehensive tutorial, he informs the attendees that none of these explanations are pertinent to the present case and heads off to conclude the investigation.
Many solutions to the feats of prestidigitation in this collection will have been covered in Fell’s lecture, but the sheer inventive genius of many of the contributors will have exceeded even Carr’s tour-de-force. In his brilliant history of the mystery genre, Murder for Pleasure (1941), Howard Haycraft warned writers of detective fiction to stay away from the locked room puzzle because “only a genius can invest it with novelty or interest today.” It should be pointed out that, however well-intentioned the admonition, nearly half the stories in this volume were written after the publication date of that cornerstone history and appreciation of the literature of crime.
The locked room mystery reached its pinnacle of popularity during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. This is when Agatha Christie flourished, and so did Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, Clayton Rawson, R. Austin Freeman, Margery Allingham, and, of course, Carr. In those years, the emphasis, particularly in England, was on the creation and solution of a puzzle. Readers were more interested in who dunnit, and how dunnit, whereas in the more modern era a greater focus has been placed on why dunnit. Murder—the taking of another person’s life—was a private affair and its solution demanded a ritual that was largely followed by most writers. The book or short story generally began with a fairly tranquil community (even if that community was in a big city, such as London or New York) in which all the participants knew each other. A terrible crime, usually murder, occurred, rending the social fabric. The police came to investigate, usually a single detective rather than an entire team of forensic experts, and either he (there were precious few female police officers in the detective stories of that era) would solve the mystery or show himself to be an abject fool, relying on a gifted, and frequently eccentric, amateur to arrive at a conclusion. Clues were placed judiciously throughout the story as the author challenged the reader to solve the case before the protagonist did. The true colors of the least likely suspect were then revealed and he or she was taken into custody, returning the community to its formerly peaceful state.
Many current readers don’t have the patience to follow the trail of clues in a detective story in which each suspect is interviewed (interrogated is a word for later mysteries), each having doubt cast on their alibis, their relationships with the victim, and their possible motive
Don’t read these stories on a subway train or the back seat of a car. They want to be read when you are comfortably ensconced in an easy chair or a bed piled high with pillows, at your leisure, perhaps with a cup of tea or a glass of port. Oh, heaven!
—OTTO PENZLER
ELSEWHEN
Anthony Boucher
Can a mystery writer have a greater tribute than to have the world’s largest gathering of crime fiction aficionados named in his honor? Although William Anthony Parker White (1911-1968), better known under the pseudonyms he used for his career as a writer of both mystery and science fiction, Anthony Boucher and H.H. Holmes, may not be as famous as a few other Golden Age detective writers, such as Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, and Erle Stanley Gardner, the annual convention is called the Bouchercon. Of course, the Anthony Awards are also named for him.
Under his real name, as well as under his pseudonyms, White established a reputation as a first-rate critic of opera and literature, including general fiction, mystery, and science fiction. He also was an accomplished editor, anthologist, playwright, and an eminent translator of French, Spanish, and Portuguese, becoming the first to translate Jorge Luis Borges into English.
He wrote prolifically in the 1940s, producing at least three scripts a week for such popular radio programs as Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Ellery Queen and The Case Book of Gregory Hood. He also wrote numerous science fiction and fantasy stories, reviewed books in those genres as H.H. Holmes for the San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Sun-Times, and produced notable anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy, and mystery genres.
As Boucher (pronounced like voucher), he served as the long-time mystery reviewer of The New York Times (1951-1968, with eight hundred fifty-two columns to his credit) and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (1957-1968). He was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America in 1946.
“Impossible” crime stories are a joy to read and very challenging to write, but Boucher gave himself a real challenge when he set “Elsewhen” in the future, combining his skills as a science fiction writer as well as a constructor of first-rate mystery plots. Even with a time machine, you will find this a classic, fair-play mystery story.
“Elsewhen” was originally published in the December 1946 issue of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine; it was first collected in Far and Away (New York, Ballantine, 1955).
Elsewhen
Anthony Boucher
“MY DEAR Agatha,” Mr. Partridge announced at the breakfast table, “I have invented the world’s first successful time machine.”
His sister showed no signs of being impressed. “I suppose this will run the electric bill up even higher,” she observed.
Mr. Partridge listened meekly to the inevitable lecture. When it was over, he protested, “But, my dear, you have just listened to an announcement that no woman on earth has ever heard before. Never before in human history has anyone produced an actual working model of a time-traveling machine.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Agatha Partridge. “What good is it?”
“Its possibilities are untold.” Mr. Partridge’s pale little eyes lit up. “We can observe our pasts and perhaps even correct their errors. We can learn the secrets of the ancients. We can plot the uncharted course of the future—new conquistadors invading brave new continents of unmapped time. We can—”
“Will anyone pay money for that?”
“They will flock to me to pay it,” said Mr. Partridge smugly.
His sister began to look impressed. “And how far can you travel with your time machine?”
Mr. Partridge buttered a piece of toast with absorbed concentration, but it was no use. His sister repeated the question: “How far can you go?”
“Not very far,” Mr. Partridge admitted reluctantly. “In fact,” he added hastily as he saw a more specific question forming, “hardly at all. And only one way. But remember,” he went on, gathering courage, “the Wright brothers did not cross the Atlantic in their first model. Marconi did not launch radio with—”
Agatha’s brief interest had completely subsided. “I thought so,” she said. “You’d still better watch the electric bill.”
It would be that way, Mr. Partridge thought, wherever he went, whomever he saw. “How far can you go?” “Hardly at all.” “Good day, sir.” People cannot be made to see that to move along the time line with free volitional motion for even one fraction of a second is as great a miracle as to zoom spectacularly ahead to 5900 A.D. He had, he could remember, felt disappointed at first himself—
The discovery had been made by accident. An experiment which he was working on—part of his long and fruitless attempt to re-create by modern scientific method the supposed results described in ancient alchemical works—had necessitated the setting up of a powerful magnetic field. And part of the apparatus within this field was a chronometer.
Mr. Partridge noted the time when he began his experiment. It was exactly fourteen seconds after nine thirty. And it was precisely at that moment that the tremor came. It was not a serious shock. To one who, like Mr. Partridge, had spent the past twenty years in southern California it was hardly noticeable. But when he looked back at the chronometer, the dial read ten thirteen.
Time can pass quickly when you are absorbed in your work, but not so quickly as all that. Mr. Partridge looked at his pocket watch. It said nine thirty-one. Suddenly, in a space of seconds, the best chronometer available had gained forty-two minutes.
The more Mr. Partridge considered the matter, the more irresistibly one chain of logic forced itself upon him. The chronometer was accurate; therefore it had registered those forty-two minutes correctly. It had not registered them here and now; therefore the shock had jarred it to where it could register them. It had not moved in any of the three dimensions of space; therefore—
The chronometer had gone back in time forty-two minutes, and had registered those minutes in reaching the present again. Or was it only a matter of minutes? The chronometer was an eight-day one. Might it have been twelve hours and forty-two minutes? Forty-eight hours? Ninety-six? A hundred and ninety-two?
And why and how and—the dominant question in Mr. Partridge’s mind—could the same device be made to work with a living being?
It would be fruitless to relate in detail the many experiments which Mr. Partridge eagerly performed to verify and check his discovery. They were purely empirical in nature, for Mr. Partridge was that type of inventor who is short on theory but long on gadgetry. He did frame a very rough working hypothesis—that the sudden shock had caused the magnetic field to rotate into the temporal dimension, where it set up a certain—he groped for words—a certain negative potential of entropy, which drew things backward in time. But he would leave the doubtless highly debatable theory to the academicians. What he must do was perfect the machine, render it generally usable, and then burst forth upon an astonished world as Harrison Partridge, the first time traveler. His dry little ego glowed and expanded at the prospect.
There were the experiments in artificial shock which produced synthetically the earthquake effect. There were the experiments with the white mice which proved that the journey through time was harmless to life. There were the experiments with the chronometer which established that the time traversed varied directly as the square of the power expended on the electromagnet.
