Section 02
02
The Mechanism
How the impossible is made to work. 4 entries.
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02.1
The sealed chamber
A room locked from the inside is a machine with one job: to make an obvious explanation impossible so that a better one has to be built.
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02.2
Carr's locked-room lecture
John Dickson Carr stopped a novel in 1935 to have his detective enumerate every possible solution to the impossible crime, in front of the reader.
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02.3
Timetables and alibis
A whole subgenre runs on printed railway timetables, where the alibi is a document and breaking it is arithmetic.
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02.4
The inverted story
Show the crime first and the reader watches the detective close the distance, which turns suspense into a different mechanism entirely.
