Murder in a closed room ( murder in a locked room , the riddle of a locked room ) is a classic plot scheme for detective prose when a murder (more rarely, a theft ) takes place in a crime scene where no one could come from and no one could get out of [1 ] . At the same time, it seems that the crime could not be committed, because the offender seemed to be dissolved in the air.
Crime (murder) in a room locked from the inside to this day remains one of the central themes of detective literature [2] .
History
The theme of inexplicable events taking place in a locked room has been known to world literature since ancient times. Such stories are found in Herodotus (the story of Rampsinite in the 2nd book of “History”) [3] and in the biblical book of the prophet Daniel (the story of Vila and the dragon in chapter 15) [4] . These plots are considered by modern critics as prototypes of the detective “secret of a locked room” [5] .
The first detective work based on the plot of “murders in a locked room” is considered to be “ Murder on Morgue Street ” by Edgar Allan Poe (1841) [2] ; the same work is considered the first work in the detective genre. The subject of a tightly enclosed, limited space is also characteristic of non-detective stories of Poe [6] ; the model of the "locked room" by Poe apparently dates back to artistic experiments with enclosed spaces in romantic literature and to the chronotope of enclosed spaces of the castle, popular in previous Gothic literature [2] . There are earlier stories based on the solution to the "secrets of a locked room", but they did not receive fame [7] [8] .
The first known detective novel based on murder in a locked room was the novel The Big Bow Mistery by the writer Israel Zangville [9] [ 18] , published in 1891.
In 1907, Gaston Leroux published the novel The Secret of the Yellow Room , which was a resounding success with the French public and caused a lot of imitations. This is the first novel built entirely around the puzzle of a crime, which, it would seem, is impossible to accomplish based on the laws of physics. The book of Leroux was considered the standard by John Dickson Carr - a writer who specialized in murders in enclosed rooms. His novel Three Coffins (1935) is highly regarded [10] by experts in detective literature. The novel describes several ideally constructed crimes in closed spaces, and in one of the chapters detective Gideon Fell gives a lecture on the technical aspects and classification of such crimes (“Lecture on a Locked Room”).
The crime in a closed room was the basis of the works of many authors [4] , including such classics of the detective genre as Conan Doyle (" Dancing Men ", " Colorful Ribbon ", etc.) [11] [9] ; many crimes in closed locations were described in their writings by Agatha Christie (“ Ten Little Indians ”, “The Mousetrap” , “ Murder on the Orient Express” , etc.), G.K. Chesterton (“Invisible”), Boileau-Narsezhak (“Engineer” too fond of numbers ") and other authors.
Notes
- ↑ N.N. Volsky. Easy reading: works on the theory and history of the detective genre: monograph. (p. 27) // Ed. NGPU, Novosibirsk (2006) - 277 p. ISBN 5-85921-590-8
- ↑ 1 2 3 O. Yu. Antsyferova. Detective genre and romantic art system. // by: National specifics of works of foreign literature of the 19th — 20th centuries. Ivanovo, 1994, p. 21-36
- ↑ Cassiday, Bruce. Roots of Detection: The Art of Deduction Before Sherlock Holmes. (English) // New York, 1983. ISBN 0804421137
- ↑ 1 2 3 The Locked Room (p. 7 ) // Donald E. Westlake. Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories. - Oxford University Press, 1996
- ↑ John Scaggs. Crime Fiction (p. 8 )
- ↑ Protsenko I. B. Aesthetics of the novelistic prose of Edgar Poe: Author. dissertations. L., 1981
- ↑ N. VOLSKY, P. MOISEEV. RUSSIAN PREDATORS OF EDGAR ON
- ↑ History of the genre - Locked Room website
- ↑ 1 2 History of the genre - “Locked Room” website
- ↑ A Locked Room Library
- ↑ E. Sermyagin. Logical Novels of Edgar Alan Poe and the Detective Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle: The Formation of the Canon of Detective Story // in Foreign Literature: Contextual and Intertextual Relations. Ekaterinburg, 2011
Literature
- Lecture on the locked room John Dickson Carr - Sat: How to make a detective. M .: Rainbow, 1990
- Michael Cook. Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction: The Locked Room Mystery. - Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 .-- 210 p. - (Crime Files). - ISBN 978-0230276659 .