It’s true that, with a self-imposed target of three posts a week all year long, I can sometimes lose a little perspective on the playfulness of this genre I love so dearly. And sometimes it’s good to be reminded that these sorts of things are supposed to be fun, y’know? Which rather neatly brings us to ‘The Locked Room’ (1972) by John Sladek.

Primarily a science fiction writer, Sladek is revered in impossible crime circles for his novels Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977), as well as a handful of very clever short stories like ‘By an Unknown Hand’ (1972). Writing at a time when the impossible crime was arguably not valued — although the occasional very strong examples loom out of the fog like mystic cities on a cursed plain — Sladek brought energy, creativity, and no small measure of genre awareness to his all-too-brief time spent in the genre. And all of that comes neatly into play here.

We begin with the well-known private detective Fenton Worth telling his ‘man’ Bozo that he, Worth, intends “to spend a quiet evening with a good book,” and must not be disturbed. Bozo, however, knows better, and strongly suspects that before too long, it’s likely that “a beautiful lady will burst in, begging you to save her life. That, or else Inspector Grogan will ask you to help recover the Stilton diamonds”. Worth nevertheless persists, and sits down with a new novel, entitled The Locked Room (19??).

Fenton had met a great many such cases in real life; indeed, they formed the bulk of his murder investigations. He had opened locked rooms containing corpses which had been done to death by strangulation, shooting, stabbing, poison, smothering, drowning, burning, being chopped to bits, electrocution, by the action of deadly snakes and spiders — and far worse.

The story, then, is not so much about the novel The Locked Room as it is about the locked room in general, with Sladek bringing a blanket of genre savvy to the various — and by now hoary — tricks that have littered many a page of many a magazine and novel down the years.

Poison gas might be introduced by a ventilator, as, indeed, might an adder. Ice bullets might be fired through the keyhole to kill, then melt, leaving no trace of the weapon. Others used poison darts fired through an otherwise inaccessible window, bombs down the chimney and so on. In one curious case a man was stabbed through the wall itself, with a very long, thin, sharp sword.

In a way, it’s apostasy to discuss the workings of this subgenre so openly, but the fun here is how thick and fast Sladek piles on the various contrivances that many of us will recognise from years spent trawling through the great, the good, and the ghastly that have been offered up. And yet, crucially, “The Locked Room, was the most baffling he’d yet encountered, and nothing like any of the others”. The meta-game here is that Sladek is clearly promising you something more than what has come before, rather like ‘The 51st Sealed Room’, a.k.a. ‘The MWA Murder’ (1951) by Robert Arthur. The question is: will he deliver something ingenious, or will he ‘The Blind Spot’ (1945) it like Barry Perowne?

To an extent, that question — inevitably lingering around the edges of this story — doesn’t matter because of the sheer number of solutions on display. Sherlock Holmes-like, we get references to Worth’s other cases: “‘The Orchid Piano Mystery’, where the victim locked himself in a room coincidentally full of broken furniture and other signs of a struggle, fainted and cracked his head on the fender” or the “‘Mauve Marimba Mystery’. There the supposed victim had merely suffered an epileptic seizure, smashed up the room, and ended by kicking himself in the face until dead (this epileptic was also a dancer)”.

See? Fun.

There is then the telling of ‘The Case of the Parched Adjutant’, in which a man is found strangled to death in his locked study, and suspicion falls on his housekeeper, who happens to be a chimpanzee. By this stage I’d lost count of how many levels of self-awareness were on display, and just let the thing sweep me off my feet, all the way to the superb closing line that only throws more doubt into the mix. Arguably this isn’t an impossible crime, and yet it’s so completely about the impossible crime — the locked room murder element of it, if not the other nine types — that, rather like with William Arden last week, it’s difficult not to lament that there aren’t a dozen of these, playing around with all the tropes that various mystery subgenres utilised time and again.

Man, imagine coming up with something like this. I honestly don’t know how these authors do it.