About

The Locked Room is about the detective story as a made form: the rules it set for itself, and what came after them.

The form is unusual in having written its constraints down. Ronald Knox published ten commandments for detective fiction in 1929; S. S. Van Dine had produced twenty of his own; the Detection Club, founded in London around 1930 under G. K. Chesterton, had its members swear their detectives would not solve crimes by Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God. Dorothy L. Sayers argued in her introductions to the Omnibus of Crime that fair play was the aesthetic foundation of the genre rather than a gentleman's convention.

Then the constraints were tested. John Dickson Carr stopped a novel to catalogue every way a sealed room had been faked. Ellery Queen printed a challenge to the reader; Dennis Wheatley sold case files with the clues loose in an envelope. Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder argued in 1944 that the puzzle was an exercise about nothing, and the American pulps had already been ignoring it for twenty years. The police procedural threw out the lone detective altogether and let the file carry the story.

How it is arranged

Six sections, twenty-three entries. Every entry is one rule, one device or one setting, and the work that tested it: The Rules, The Mechanism, The Reader, The Break, The Squad and The Room. The full list sits on one page.

Scope

Writers discussed here are figures of literary history — Poe, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Knox, Carr, Chandler, Hammett, Crofts, Simenon, McBain. The subject is craft: how a puzzle is built, printed and sold, and what happens to a rule when a good book breaks it.