Death Locked In Read online

  Douglas G. Greene and Robert C. S. Adey – Death Locked In

  WELCOME!

  Inside this volume you’ll find murder and mayhem presented by some of the world’s greatest crime writers—

  John Dickson Carr gives Dr. Gideon Fell the problem of the woman found strangled on a beach, where the sand is unmarked by footprints.

  Ngaio Marsh has Inspector Roderick Alleyn solve a murder in a locked dressing room.

  Bill Pronzini assigns his nameless private eye to shadow an automobile until its occupant suddenly vanishes into thin air.

  Edward D. Hoch presents a spy story featuring murder in a locked automobile.

  Anthony Boucher shows how to commit the perfect crime—with a time machine.

  Frederic Brown tells a cockeyed tale of a ghoul who wants to get into—not out of—a locked morgue.

  Ellery Queen examines the many facets of an impossible disappearance of priceless diamonds.

  Clayton Rawson, with the help of the Great Merlini, demonstrates how to disappear from a telephone booth surrounded by witnesses.

  L. Frank Baum, who would later send Dorothy and Toto on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, dispatches a moneylender in an entirely different fashion.

  Wilkie Collins will keep you awake with the case of a murderous bedroom.

  Cornell Woolrich checks in with a story of a hotel room that kills.

  Lillian de la Torre recreates the first true historical locked-room mystery.

  And another ten tantalizingly teasing tales to taunt and terrify you in this collection of the greatest locked-room murders and impossible crimes.

  Death Locked In

  An Anthology of Locked Room Stories

  Edited by Douglas G. Greene and Robert C. S. Adey

  DEDICATION

  For my brothers, David L. Green and Paul E. Greene

  —DGG

  For my parents, Ronald and Elsie Adey

  —RCSA

  Copyright © 1987 by Douglas G. Greene. All rights reserved.

  This edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc., by arrangement with Douglas G. Greene.

  1994 Barnes & Noble Books

  ISBN 1-56619-454-7

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  M987654 3 21

  an ebookman scan

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Edward D. Hoch, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Derek Smith and Dennis McMillan for helping to obtain stories, and to Lillian de la Torre for allowing us to appropriate (well, almost) the title of one of her short stories, “Murder Lock’d In.” Thanks also go to Hugh Abramson, publisher of International Polygonics, who suggested this anthology, encouraged its completion, and watched over it every step of the way. I owe much to my co-editor, Robert C. S. Adey, who chose and introduced several of the stories and whose definitive work, Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes, is a guide to anyone interested in miracle problems.

  —DGG

  We are grateful for permission to reprint the following stories:

  “The First Locked Room” by Lillian de la Torre. Copyright 1950 by Mercury Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  “I Can Find My Way Out” by Ngaio Marsh. Copyright 1946 by the American Mercury, Inc. Copyright renewed 1974 by Ngaio Marsh. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  “The Spherical Ghoul” by Fredric Brown. Copyright 1943 by Standard Magazines. Reprinted by permission of Roberta Pryor Inc.

  “Out of this World” by Peter Godfrey. Copyright © by Peter Godfrey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Magic Bullet” by Edward D. Hoch. Copyright © 1968 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Room with Something Wrong” by Cornell Woolrich. Copyright 1938 by Red Star News Co. Copyright renewed 1965 by Cornell Woolrich. Reprinted by permission of The Chase Manhattan Bank N.A. as executor of the estate of Cornell Woolrich.

  “Invisible Hands” by John Dickson Carr. Copyright © 1958 by John Dickson Carr. Copyright renewed 1986 by Clarice M. Carr, Bonita Marie Cron, Julia McNiven and Mary B. Howes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  “The X Street Murders” by Joseph Commings. Copyright 1962 by Joseph Commings. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure of the Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds” by Ellery Queen. Copyright 1943 by The American Mercury, Inc. Copyright renewed 1970 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agents for the estate, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York, 10022.

  “Off the Face of the Earth” by Clayton Rawson. Copyright © 1949 by The American Mercury, Inc. Copyright renewed 1977 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  “Thin Air” by Bill Pronzini. Copyright © 1979 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Elsewhen” by Anthony Boucher. Copyright 1943 by Anthony. Boucher. Copyright renewed 1971 by Phyllis White. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  Contents

  Douglas G. Greene and Robert C. S. Adey – Death Locked In

  Acknowledgments

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Historical Locked Room

  The First Locked Room by Lillian de la Torre (1902-1993)

  Death Locked and Sealed

  Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873)

  I Can Find My Way Out By Ngaio Marsh (1899-1982)

  The Suicide of Kiaros by L. Frank Baum (1856-1919)

  I

  II

  III

  The Spherical Ghoul by Fredric Brown (1906-1972)

  Murder Makes the Morgue Go

  Why the Dead Man Crossed the Road

  Facing Horror

  Wildest Talent

  Horror in a Bowling Ball

  Out of His Head by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907)

  The Danseuse

  A Mystery

  Thou Art the Man

  Pant’s Confession

  Murder by Proxy by M. McDonnell Bodkin (1850-1933)

  Out of This World by Peter Godfrey (1917-1992)

  The Mystery of the Hotel De L’Orme by M. M. B.

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  The Magic Bullet by Edward D. Hoch (1930- )

  Rooms That Kill, Footprints in the Sand, And a Mysterious Gun

  A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)

  The Room With Something Wrong By Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968)

  Invisible Hands by John Dickson Carr (1906-1977)

  The X Street Murders by Joseph Commings (1913-1992)

  Impossible Disappearances

  The Mystery of Room No. 11 by Nicholas Carter

  Willie Gray’s Astonishing Adventure

  The Strange Conduct of Mr. Gray

  In The Rooms of Broker Benedict

  The Man Who Disappeared by L. T. Meade (1844-1914) and Robert Eustace (1854-1943)

  The Invisible Man by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

  The Adventure of the Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds by Ellery Queen (Manfred B. Lee, 1905—1971; Frederic Dannay, 1905—1982)

  The Characters

  Setting

  Scene I: Kenyon’s Office, Maiden Lane

  Scene 2: The Same, Next Day

  Scene 3: The Queen Apartment, a Week Later

  Scene 4: A Room in a New York Hotel, Later

  Scene 5: The Same, Later

  Scene 6: The Queen Apartment, Next Morning.

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sp; The Solution

  Scene 7: The Same, Immediately After

  The Mystery of the Lost Special by A. Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

  Off The Face of the Earth by Clayton Rawson (1906-1971)

  The Grinning God by May Futrelle (1876 ?)

  The House That Was By Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912)

  Thin Air by Bill Pronzini (1943- )

  Tomorrow’s Locked Room

  ELSEWHEN by Anthony Boucher (1911-1968)

  The Editors

  End of Douglas G. Greene And Robert C. S. Adey – Death Locked In

  Introduction

  Detective stories come in all shapes and sizes, penny plain and two-penny colored. They can be slow-moving cerebral exercises or fast-paced thrillers or just about anything in-between, and fictional detectives investigate all manner of crimes, from the kidnapping of pet poodles to the loss of nuclear bombs. Sleuths constantly happen on corpses—in airplanes and on ships, in country houses and in slums, in forests and on football fields, in the White House and the jailhouse.

  And in locked rooms.

  It is ingenuity that ties together the stories in Death Locked In. John Dickson Carr, the greatest exponent of the seemingly impossible crime, wrote that “though this quality of ingenuity is not necessary to the detective story as such, you will never find the great masterpiece without it. Ingenuity lifts the thing up; it is triumphant; it blazes, like a diabolical lightning flash, from beginning to end. . .When ... we find ourselves flumdiddled by some master stroke of ingenuity which has turned our suspicions legitimately in the wrong direction, we can only salute the author and close the book with a kind of admiring curse.” Readers of tales of miracle crimes want to know not only “whodunit” but also “how on earth could it have been done.” How can a person be murdered while alone in a locked, indeed a hermetically sealed, room? How can a murderer strangle his victim who is sitting alone on a beach, and yet leave no footprints? How can someone disappear from a house or, even more daringly, from an automobile that is constantly under observation? How can a man be killed by a pistol that is sealed in an envelope at the moment of the crime?

  How can? That’s the key question which locked-room readers approach a story of an impossible crime. Other fans of fictional mayhem may enjoy a supercharged spy thriller, or a naturalistic trip down mean streets, or the angst of a policeman who is just as worried about his digestion or his sex life as he is about the case he is more or less investigating; but true locked-room fans want something more. They want to be puzzled, to be challenged, even to be fooled. One type of reader, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “not only desires to be gulled, but even desires to be gullible.” Others, more active types, hope to reach the solution ahead of the detective; they work out timetables and re-read each word watching for the hidden clue, the disguised motive, the carefully placed red-herring, the true explanation of the locked room or the miraculous disappearance.

  Locked-room murders and other seemingly impossible crimes—called by aficionados “miracle problems”—have a long history. For example, a brief undeveloped episode in Chretien de Troyes’s twelfth-century romance, LANCELOT OR THE KNIGHT OF THE CART, is similar to the plot of Wilkie Collin’s classic tale of a murderous room, “A Terribly Strange Bed.” Many of the Gothic novels from the 1790s to the 1830s feature apparently supernatural events that are explained, not always persuasively, at the dénouement. Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) has among many other ghostly events, a disappearance from a locked room. Perhaps the most interesting predecessor of the locked-room story is E.T.A. Hoffman’s early nineteenth-century novella, “Mademoiselle de Scuderi, A Tale of the Times of Louis XIV,” about a series of mysterious robberies and murders on the streets of Paris. When the murderer was pursued, he “sprang aside into the shade and disappeared through the wall.” A policeman explained:

  We lighted the torches and sounded the wall backwards and forwards—not an indication of a door or a window or an opening. It was a strong stone wall bounding a yard, and was joined on to a house in which live people against whom there has never risen the slightest suspicion. Today I have again taken a careful survey of the whole place. It must be the Devil himself who is mystifying us.

  Later in the story, a man was discovered stabbed to death within a locked house. Sadly for locked-room fans, these scenes are only a small part of Hoffman s 30,000-word tale, and the explanation, involving a secret passage, makes one question the competence of those who “sounded the wall backwards and forwards.”

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838) is probably the first “genuine” locked-room story, that is, one in which the apparent impossibility is a major plot element and which does not depend on such unfair devices as secret passages. Le Fanu’s tale did not need a detective to explain it, but with the growth of interest in detection, both real and fictional, during the rest of the 19th century it became common to have a sleuth unravel miracle crimes. Eventually, almost every great detective solved a locked-room or an impossible disappearance during his or her career, and several specialized in such situations—The Thinking Machine, Father Brown, Dr. Gideon Fell, Rolf Le Roux, The Great Merlini. Senator Brooks U. Banner and others. In recent years, these amateur sleuths have been joined by private eyes and secret agents in explaining tricks and impossibilities.

  The stories in Death Locked In challenge the impossible. The gates of the unknown are opened, devils fly, ghosts walk, and witches’ curses are real. Crimes are committed that can have no rational, human explanation. Or so it seems. . . . We invite you to be challenged by the most ingenious of detective stories.

  DOUGLAS G. GREENE

  The Historical Locked Room

  The First Locked Room by Lillian de la Torre (1902-1993)

  Occasionally unimaginative critics will state that locked-room murders do not occur in real life. That is, of course, demonstrably false. Evidence about a locked-room crime was presented to a law court as early as 1733. The case is recounted here by Lillian de la Torre, the mistress of what she called “histo-detection.” De la Torre devised new solutions to the classic mysteries of Elizabeth Canning (Elizabeth is Missing), the Douglas claimant (The Heir of Douglas) and Belle Gunness (The Truth about Belle Gunness), and she edited a collection of articles about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century highwaymen, cut-purses and other wrong ‘uns (Villainy Detected). She was best known for her four volumes of short stories featuring the eighteenth-century Great Cham of Literature, Dr. Samuel Johnson, acting as a “detector,” with Boswell in the role of Watson. “The First Locked Room,” de la Torre explained, “is all true; according to my custom I have not even put words into people’s mouths unless I found the words in the old accounts.”

  THEY were all dead in their beds. The two old women lay strangled. The young maid had fought for her life; she lay in a welter of blood, with her hair tossed about her.

  The outside windows were four stories above Tanfield Court and the staircase windows were barred. They had locked them all, not against intrusion, but against the infection of the night vapors.

  The front door was locked and bolted.

  None of the gaping London crowd had ever heard of such a state of affairs; three women lying murdered in a place that was locked and barred. It was the year 1733. There were no detective stories, then, and no detectives either; no Scotland Yard, no Metropolitan Police, not even a single Bow Street runner. There was a justice of the peace in Bow Street, one Thomas De Veil, dispensing law and order strictly for cash; but his writ did not run in Tanfield Court. Tanfield Court was part of the Inner Temple. The lawyers who resorted there were too deep in their torts and mortauncestries to take cognizance of a real flesh-and-blood crime. The dignity of the law in Tanfield Court fell to be upheld by the Inner Temple watch.

  That worthy stood about helplessly, all dubiety from his antique round hat to his buckled shoes. In spite of the panoply of his authority, the broad leathern belt about his
middle and the staff of office in his hand, he was at a loss. He wondered what to do.

  The center of an excited group of neighbors, Mistress Ann Love was telling how she came to make the gruesome discovery on this quiet winter Sunday. Her cap-muslin vibrated and the lawn kerchief upon her bosom rose and fell with agitation as she remembered her awful experience.

  Mrs. Lydia Duncomb had been known to her for thirty years. The old lady, now bed-ridden, was a woman with a fortune; it consisted of a silver tankard and a green purse of gold moidores and broad pieces. She lived alone in the highest lodging in Tanfield Court with her old serving-woman Betty. When Betty grew too old for service, kind Mrs. Duncomb kept her on, and hired others to work for them both. For a while she depended on the regular charwomen of the Temple; but shortly before Christmas she had hired young Ann Price to live in and be always at hand.

  “I was bidden to dine,” agitated Mrs. Love told the neighbors. “At exactly one o’clock I came to the chamber-door. I knocked and waited a considerable time, but nobody answered.”

  Upon this, alarm had risen in the visitor’s soul. She ran up and down the narrow stairs seeking assistance. A couple of charwomen were standing about. One of them, an impudent Irish wench in a blue riding-hood, Sarah Malcolm by name, was well known to Mrs. Love as a former charwoman of Mrs. Duncomb’ s.

  Mrs. Love accosted her:

  “Prithee, Sarah, go and fetch the smith to open the door.”

  “I will go with all speed,” said the Irish wench, and sauntered off.

  She came back, which in itself is curious, and suggests that she knew no more than Mrs. Love what lay behind that bolted door. She came back without the smith.

  “Oh!” says Mrs. Love to the other charwoman, with whom she was on more ceremonious terms, “Mistress Oliphant, I believe they are all dead, and the smith is not come. What shall we do to get in?”