The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries Otto Penzler

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler turns his crime fiction expertise to that highly unique and unusual short story form: the locked room mystery, or impossible crime tale, in this anthology of more than 60 stories. A VINTAGE PAPERBACK ORIGINAL.

The locked-room mystery may be the perfect form of mystery short story. As Penzler points out in his introduction, it does not require an actual locked room, merely any location with an utterly inaccessible murder victim-or, sometimes, an object to be stolen. Here are 68 stories representing the different varieties of the form: It begins with seven classics, including Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and the story that started it all, Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue". Then the different types of murders-deaths by stabbing (John Dickson Carr, Stephen King), shooting (Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon), poison (Dorothy L. Sayers, Margaret Frazer, P. G. Wodehouse)-as well as creative murders (Lawrence Block, Edward D. Hoch), murders committed without any footprints evident (Michael Ennis, Fredric Brown), people and objects who disappear from well-secured spaces (Stanley Ellin, Dashiell Hammett), and tales of thievery (Erle Stanley Gardner).