THE LUCKY THIRTEEN – Part Three

by Steven Steinbock

The tenth title in my ongoing series of profile of favorite mystery anthologies is Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories edited by Doug Green and Bob Adey (1987). For now, it will be the last. (I promised thirteen, and for a while I thought there’d be even more, but for now I’m tired of it, and judging from the lack of comments, I sense that you are, too. Besides, I’ll be away from my library for the next month, so I won’t have access to my books).

The knowledge and love that Doug Greene and Bob Adey show toward their subject – impossible crime stories – is unparalleled. (Okay. I can’t leave out Ed Hoch and Hidetoshi Mori).

Death Locked In is the sort of anthology Fred Dannay (half of “Ellery Queen”) would have loved. (Then again, he might have been jealous that he didn’t do it himself). Doug, in his introduction, emphasizes the nature of these stories as challenges to the reader. He draws connections between several of the stories in the volume and several much older stories. Each story is preceded by a page of background introduction, another Queensian trait.

The first story in the volume, Lillian de la Torre’s “The First Locked Room,” is based on an actual historical case, adapted from court transcripts and news accounts from 1733. The story doesn’t feature de la Torre’s regular sleuth, Dr. Samuel Johnson (although Johnson was, of course, a historical figure who lived during the time that this case occurred). The story is similar to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in that women (three: two old ladies and their maid) are brutally killed in a fourth-floor apartment.

The term “hermetically sealed” has taken on the stigma of a cliché. Originally an occult term, it means “airtight.” “Hermetically sealed” is often applied to locked-room mysteries. But in the case of the de la Torre story, the apartment really was hermetically sealed. There was an influenza epidemic going on. Suffice it to say, de la Torre didn’t have to rely on exotic animals to explain the crime. Good story.

An exotic animal DOES play a role in one of the stories, and it’s one of my favorites in this volume, written by one of my favorite authors. But I can’t name it without giving away a nice surprise.

The great stories in this volume are too numerous to describe in this column. But I’ll list some. There are two “Thinking Machine” stories, one by Jacques Futrelle, and the other by his widow, May. Other early stories include those by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, and “Nicholas Carter.” “Oz” creator L. Frank Baum’s “The Suicide of Kiaros” is included. Several stories involve deadly rooms, including Wilkie Collins’ “The Terribly Strange Bed” and Cornell Woorich’s “The Room with Something Wrong.” The Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” would also fit in this category, but the charm of Death Locked In is that it contains gems that we aren’t likely to find elsewhere.

Of course, a volume such as this wouldn’t be complete without stories by John Dickson Carr (“Invisible Hands”), Clayton Rawson (“Off the Face of the Earth”), Edward Hoch (“The Magic Bullet”), and Bill Pronzini (“Thin Air”).

For the time being, this will be that last of my series of anthology reviews. I originally threatened to list thirteen, but my list frankly ran out of steam. I’ll be back next week with something else.