'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

Blindsided: Murder Mystery Plot Twists

Skilled mystery authors can use an ingenious plot twist to surprise and stump even veteran mystery readers. Here are some favorites that continue to inspire imitation and inventive variation. Let's start with the Narrator Culprit. Readers tend to trust the mystery narrator, especially if he or she is a victim, sympathetic witness or helpful aide to investigators, so it's a real shock to find out they've been bamboozled by a villain (and the author). It worked in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and the more recent Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The Impossible Murder twist is another favorite in which the evidence seems to contradict logic and science, including the many variations on the classic "locked room" murder. Read John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins for an ingenious example that includes a locked room death followed minutes later by the shooting death of the main suspect on a snow-covered street, surrounded only by his own footprints yet with a powder burn showing he was shot at close range. The Supernatural Killer is a popular way to play mind games with readers, too. There's often a spooky house, a ghost sighting, a curse, an old crime and a new one, and clues that fit both natural and supernatural explanations. A recent example is Tana French's The Secret Place, in which adolescent girls at a posh Irish boarding school claim to police investigators that they see the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder. Similarly, The Chinese Gold Murders, the second entry in Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee series set in ancient China, involves sightings of a murdered magistrate's ghost, as well as a murdered monk in the wrong grave and a tiger at large, events Judge Dee traces to a common cause to solve the mystery. Finally, there's the Not Really Dead Suspect ploy, in which the author misdirects reader attention away from a supposedly dead character as in Agatha Christie's famous And Then There Were None. For more classic plot twists courtesy of Queen of Mystery Christie, read http://flavorwire.com/537670/agatha-christies-10-best-plot-twists/10