So in effect, picking up a locked-room mystery is like accepting a challenge from the author – a challenge that you are hoping to lose. The skill with which Carr conjures a diabolic atmosphere, as well as the effortlessness with which he threads his clues throughout the narrative, all there in plain sight. My personal favourite is John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, which I still find dazzling even though I know how it ends. The best locked-room mystery stories are those which leave you giddy at the sheer scope of their invention. Things can never be quite the same again. Their perception of the world has been changed for good. If the author has done their job well, the reader has been outsmarted a solution they could never have imagined has come to light. However, even when the seeming impossibility has been dismantled by the sleuth, the effect is not necessarily cathartic.
As a subgenre, the locked-room mystery is steeped in the gothic and the uncanny, often with hints of the supernatural – but inevitably, logic and reason triumph in the end. You see, the stories I write are locked-room mysteries, or “impossible crimes.” They are puzzles where not only the moral order but the very fabric of reality is disrupted: it is not merely a question of who could have committed the crime, but how the crime could possibly have been committed. This is an interesting idea, parts of which I would like to agree with. As such, murder mysteries are a necessary distraction from the murkiness and uncertainty of the real world. With the guilty one identified, suspicion is lifted we are innocent once again. According to Auden, the solution of the mystery represents a return to a “state of grace” akin to that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Auden, who wrote an influential essay called “The Guilty Vicarage.” In it he explores the subject of mystery fiction in considerable depth. They offer an escape from the disorder we encounter in our own lives. That tales in which a mystery is solved, a criminal is brought to justice, and order is restored, provide a sense of catharsis. There’s a school of thought which states that old-fashioned fair-play murder mysteries (I’m talking specifically about whodunits and variants thereof) fulfil an essential need in human nature. National Emerging Writer Programme Overview.
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