'Impossible Murders' Challenge Mystery Buffs

The "impossible murder" or the "locked room murder" is a fun mystery plot device that includes early examples such as Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle outings with Sherlock Holmes. These mystery puzzlers generally include a victim who is apparently alone, or a murderer who inexplicably disappears, and suspects who have solid alibis and/or could not have logically committed the crime. "Impossible murder" purists turn up their noses at any explanations that rely on supernatural agents, hokey secret passages, or gimmicks like Edgar Allan Poe's killer orangutan in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. John Dickson Carr is a master of the "locked room" tale. Consider his 1935 puzzler The Hollow Man about a professor found murdered in a room locked from the inside, with people apparently present in the hall outside during the murder, and the ground below the room's window covered in unbroken snow. Similarly, award-winning French author Paul Halter specializes in "impossible murders" and began his career with The Fourth Door: The Houdini Murders, in which seemingly impossible murders are believed to be the work of a reincarnated Houdini--until Dr. Alan Twist unveils the rational solution. Ellery Queen penned a doozy with The King Is Dead, in which a wealthy munitions magnate, whose brother threatens to shoot him at midnight, locks himself in a hermetically sealed office. When the brother, under constant observation, pulls the trigger of an empty gun at midnight, the magnate is hit by a bullet, proved to be from the same gun, in his sealed room, where no gun is found. Two Japanese authors of impossible murder stories include Soji Shimada and Keigo Higashino. Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders challenges the reader to explain a cycle of gruesome "impossible" murders that begin with the locked-room death of an artist and continue to take the lives of his relatives over four decades. In Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint, the murderer's identity is known, but she has a seemingly unbreakable alibi: She was on the other side of Japan at the time of the murder. For a list of more "locked room" mysteries, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-room_mystery