Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries: 0 (An American Mystery Classic) Paperback – 5 Aug. 2022

It great book good stories golden age crime

Like many an Agatha Christie fan, a good locked room mystery is irresistible to me. This collection has fourteen of them. The addition of a 'golden age' (1920s-194os) setting sent this right up to the top of my 'to read' list. Some of the mysteries feature an actual locked rooms, others are simply the 'locked room' type - seemingly impossible crimes which ultimately turn out to have rational, if convoluted, explanations.All fourteen are by different authors and were written contemporaneously - no modern throwbacks. As you'd expect with such a collection, the writing styles are all different and some I liked a lot better than others. It was also interesting to see how some stories had aged much better than others. I find Christie herself to have timelessness about her style, which is true of some of these too. However others felt more dated - full of archaic expressions and wording or attitudes that don't sit well with a modern reader.My favourite was 'The Light at Three O'Clock' and I also really liked the time-travel murder mystery in 'Elsewhen'. Each story has short introduction - just a couple of pages - about the author. Even if you're not too interested in the history of the genre, it's worth at least skimming these as they sometimes provide good information about the characters and their set-up, which is useful if you're not familiar with them from other works by the author.The collection should appeal to people who are interested in literary history, and to those who simply enjoy a good selection of detective stories. Personally I almost always prefer novels to short stories, because I like the greater sense of connection with the characters and more complex plots offered by the longer form, and this was no exception to that. But it was worth reading for the stories that I particularly enjoyed, and none of them was downright bad.

“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.” - ‘Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries’ edited by Otto Penzler.This anthology is part of the publishers’ excellent American Mystery Classics series. It is edited and introduced by Otto Penzler. He also provides a short introduction for each of its fourteen authors and the stories selected, providing biographical details and publication history.In discussing the attraction of the ‘locked room mystery’, Penzler writes: “It is not realistic and was never intended to be. It is entertainment, as all fiction is . . . or should be. Dorothy L. Sayers pointed out that people have amused themselves by creating riddles, conundrums, and puzzles of all kinds, with the apparently sole purpose being the satisfaction they give themselves by deducing a solution.”I found the anthology well curated and a pleasure to read. Rather than read straight through, I read a few stories each day. All were good, rating between 4-5 stars. My favourites were Ellery Queen’s ‘The House of Haunts’, John Dickson Carr’s ‘The Third Bullet’, and Anthony Boucher’s ‘Elsewhen’, which cleverly blended mystery with science fiction.The book is rounded out with suggested discussion questions and a list of the titles to date in the American Mystery Classics series, providing plenty of ideas for future reading.I expect that this anthology will appeal to readers interested in seeing how various American Golden Age crime writers approached the ‘locked room’ mystery.4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

Selected and edited by Otto Penzler, this anthology of 14 American impossible crime stories-seven from the 1930s and seven from the 1940s - has an impressive roster of star authors. They run the gamut from Boucher to Woolrich, alphabetically, from Eberhart to Rawson, chronologically, and divide 2-12 by gender.Many of the stories will be familiar to fans of the sub-genre, JD Carr being represented by The Third Bullet and Ellery Queen by the novella The House of Haunts/The Lamp of God, for instance. My personal favourites include Joseph Commings' Fingerprint Ghost and Clayton Rawson's delightfully-deft Off the Face of the Earth. Mr Penzler's Introduction and introductory notes add great value to this useful and mostly entertaining volume. Newcomers to the world of the Locked Room will find it essential reading.Thank you to NetGalley and Penzler Publishers for the digital review copy.

A really good collection of short stories. Each story is very different from the others. They are creative and introduced me to another group of mystery writers. The varied approaches to the locked room mysteries added another element of interest.

Some stories were OK, but many were just pulp, not ingenious locked room mysteries.

A nice compendium of 14 '30s detective/crime fiction, but most do not involve locked rooms. Long (almost 100 pages) and entertaining pieces from John Dickson Carr (yes, a locked room mystery as you would expect from Carr) and Ellery Queen (no locked rooms, but a large house disappears) as well as shorter offerings from such luminaries as Anthony Boucher, Mignon Eberhart, Erle Stanley Gardner and McKinley Kantor (yes, the McKinley Kantor who won a Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville). Short intros before each story.

I'm planning on writing a locked room mystery. This collection will surely help. Nice assortment of puzzlers! A keeper!

-- A good selection of impossible crimes, though not all of them are strictly locked room. The Ellery Queen one, for example, involves the disappearance of something that might usually be expected not to disappear. Compiler manages to avoid a lot of the standard classics you tend to see everywhere. Worth the money.