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In crime fiction, a locked room mystery (or cosy) is a particular kind of mystery story, where a murder or crime is apparently committed under impossible circumstances: no one could have entered or left the scene of the crime, and the death involved could not have been a suicide.

Such stories normally follow other conventions of detective fiction, in that the reader is presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and so encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution.

Typically, a "locked room" in this narrow meaning of the word is a room in which a murder is committed. There are a limited number of suspects, some of them possibly even without a watertight alibi. But on closer inspection, it turns out that no one could possibly have perpetrated the murder, because at the time the murder was committed, there was definitely no way of entering or leaving the room unseen or without leaving a trace.

The prima facie impression, almost invariably would be that the perpetrator has vanished into thin air.

History

Even though the mystery or detective genre wasn't established until the 19th and 20th centuries, the apocryphal Biblical story of Bel and the Dragon has some similarities to locked room mysteries.

However, the earliest modern example of this type of story is generally held to be Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The story contains Poe's statement of the "rules" of the locked-room mystery.

Another notable early example was written by French journalist and author, Gaston Leroux with Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room ) (1908). Locked room mysteries flourished with the popularity of writers like John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and Agatha Christie.

Examples

The following are examples of "impossible" or "locked-room" crimes:

The only door, locked from the inside, has to be forced open by those who discover the victim (and the position of the body clearly suggests that the victim could not have locked it after being struck down by the killer).
There is no fireplace or chimney through which the murderer might have escaped.
The only window is barred from the inside, or there is virgin snow on the window sill outside.
There is no secret passage leading to, or trapdoor anywhere in, the room.
The murder weapon is nowhere to be found although the victim has clearly been poisoned, stabbed, shot or strangled (with the cause of death established beyond doubt in an autopsy some time later).
If the victim has been electrocuted, no live wires can be found anywhere near the corpse; if they have been shot, no one within usual hearing distance remembers hearing a report.

These "facts" obtain the interest of the reader, and build up a palpitating curiosity to find a solution to the seemingly impossible crime. This explains the huge popularity of such novels to their fans. In many locked room mysteries, plausibility is neglected in favour of maximum ingenuity, reader involvement, and suspense. Among avid readers, heated discussions can ensue after the publication of a particular novel as to whether it is really possible to commit the perfect murder the way described.

Some example loopholes that a reader may find:

If the victim is found stabbed in a locked room on one of the upper floors of a building, no murder weapon is found and a window giving onto a backyard has been left open, could they have been killed by a professional knife-thrower from the building across the yard by means of a knife to which a long cord was attached? (This is a variation on the "dagger with wings" idea.)
Can eye-witnesses be deluded into thinking they have seen a particular person enter or leave a room when in fact what they saw was just an image in a mirror?
Can people gain access to a house by posing as someone else, wearing clothes made of paper, and then getting rid of them—as they would be evidence if they did not—by burning them in the open fire?
How plausible is the "polar poniard", a dagger made of ice that melts before the murder is discovered?

Authors and works

One of the masters of the locked-room subgenre is John Dickson Carr. His novel The Hollow Man is considered by many to be the finest locked room mystery novel of all time—although Carr himself names Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room as his favourite. The Hollow Man gives an explicatory recipe for crime writers. Chapter 17 of the book consists of a theoretical digression entitled "The Locked-Room Lecture". In it, Dr Gideon Fell (the detective) gives an extensive explanation of how the murderer is able to deceive everyone else (at least until the riddle is finally solved). How, for example, Fell asks, can the perpetrator create the impression of a hermetically sealed chamber when in fact it is not? What means are there of tampering with a door so that it seems to be locked on the inside? This is just one of the answers -- and, as it happens, a most simple one -- given by Fell:

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