“You’ve got Soames on video? Thank God for that.”
I nodded. “I expect your defence will make good use of it. Extenuating circumstances – is that the phrase?”
“Professional misconduct is another,” said Leggatt. “Doctors who kill don’t get much leniency from the courts.”
“You carried out the autopsy on Soames, deciding, of course, that he died of a coronary, and it wouldn’t be necessary to send any of the organs for forensic examination. But what did you plan to do with the other body – the poor old codger who dropped dead when the sub-postmistress looked him in the eye?”
“Not a serious problem,” said Leggatt. “This is a teaching hospital and bodies are donated for medical research. We keep them here in the mortuary. It could all be fixed with paperwork.”
“I wonder if we’ll ever discover who he was,” I said, little realizing that it would become my job for the next six weeks. A DC who solves an impossible crime doesn’t get much thanks from his superior. The reverse, I discovered. I’m still looking for promotion.
AFTERWORD
The impossible crime story has been around as long as the mystery story has existed. The gothic mystery, so popular in the late eighteenth century, abounded in stories of purportedly haunted rooms, though the solution usually related to a secret passage. Such was the case in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and even E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Mademoiselle de Scudari” (1819), even though the latter gives some pretext to being a genuine locked-room murder.
The first real locked-room mystery that did not rely on a secret passage – despite its title – was “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published in The Dublin University Magazine for November 1838. Le Fanu is best remembered today for his macabre novels like Uncle Silas (1864), which also includes a variant on his locked-room idea, and the vampire story “Carmilla” (1872). The only feature that Le Fanu’s story lacks is that of a detective intent on solving the mystery. That was soon provided by Edgar Allan Poe who, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841), provided the firm footing for the detective story. Needless to say Poe’s story is grotesque and bizarre, but it is a bona fide locked-room mystery.
A few other locked-room stories appeared during the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps the best known being “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (Household Words, 24 April 1852). The story was published by Charles Dickens, and I’m a little surprised that Dickens did not turn his hand to the impossible crime story as he would certainly have brought considerable ingenuity to it. By and large the mid-Victorian impossible crime story retains too many trappings of the gothic era and, though original at the time, today seem a little too trite. That’s the main reason I have not reprinted them – beyond the fact that most are easily available in the authors’ collected stories. The only one I have selected is from Out of His Head (1862) by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which is both original and feels far more modern than its contemporaries.
The real explosion in the impossible crime story came in 1892 as a result of two significant publications. The first was a novel, The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, serialized in the London evening paper The Star. This is the first full-length novel written solely round a murder in a locked room. Zangwill had thought about the problem for several years before he wrote the novel and his creativity and originality shows. Gone are the secret passages and other devices. Here was a novel where the crime had been committed with incredible ingenuity and had to be solved with equal skill and deduction. Needless to say during its serialization readers of The Star wrote in suggesting their own solutions – none of which was right – and the thrill and enticement of the locked-room mystery became only too evident.
The other publication was a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (The Strand Magazine, February 1892). The immediate success of the Holmes stories in The Strand is well known. Arthur Conan Doyle was fascinated with the idea of unusual crimes, and what makes the Holmes stories stand out is that all of the crimes are bizarre, a real test for Holmes’s deductive powers. Holmes had no interest in the run-of-the-mill crime. Perhaps, because of that, it is surprising that there are not more impossible crimes amongst the Holmes canon. Strictly there are only two, the other being “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (The Strand Magazine, February 1922) where a murder is committed but no visible weapon.
The Big Bow and “Speckled Band”, coming together just at the time when the popular fiction magazine was blossoming, opened the door for the impossible crime story. The late Victorian and Edwardian writers loved them. Conan Doyle wrote one further example, “The Story of the Lost Special” (The Strand Magazine, August 1898) where a train vanishes from a stretch of rail. L.T. Meade produced ever more bizarre solutions to her crimes, especially those collected in A Master of Mysteries (1898).
The next major breakthrough, however, came in 1905. In America the author Jacques Futrelle published “The Problem of Cell 13” as a serial in The Boston American (30 October – 5 November 1905), challenging the newspaper’s readers to solve the story. It introduced Futrelle’s character Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, known as the Thinking Machine, who has such a power of deduction that he is able to resolve any problem, no matter how impossible it seems. In this first story he set himself the challenge of escaping from a locked cell in a high-security prison, kept constantly under watch. How he did it remains one of the most remarkable stories ever written. Over the next six years Futrelle wrote several dozen Thinking Machine stories, not all of which appeared in book-form. They included stories in which things disappear from guarded rooms, a car vanishes from a stretch of road, and even an entire house disappears. It was such a tragedy that Futrelle was killed when the Titanic sank in 1912.
It was also in 1905 that Edgar Wallace published The Four Just Men, along with much publicity and gimmickry. Wallace had published the book himself and deliberately left the ending open, offering a prize to the reader who could solve the baffling murder of a man in broad daylight surrounded (but not touched) by policemen in a locked room. Needless to say the redoubtable Edgar Wallace employed the locked-room idea many times in his books and stories, with perhaps the most ingenious being in The Crimson Circle (1922), where a man is found gassed in a locked room.
Soon after The Four Just Men came one of the most popular of all locked-room mysteries, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). The author was Gaston Leroux, best known for The Phantom of the Opera (1911). The novel, which is still in print, is one of the best developed of all locked-room deaths, and is all the more fun because of the rivalry between the detective, Frederick Larson, and the newspaper reporter, Joseph Rouletabille, to solve the crime.
If the impossible crime story needed any final seal of approval it came in 1911 with the publication of The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton. The stories had already caused a sensation in The Story-Teller, where they had started to appear from the September 1910 issue. The editor of The Story-Teller, Arthur Spurgeon, was so impressed by the stories that he announced them with the proclamation that: “the plots are so amazing and so cleverly worked out that I believe they will prove to be the best detective stories of our time.” There were in total five volumes of Father Brown stories, many of them falling into the category of the impossible crime, especially those in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926).