Locked-room mystery

The prima facie impression from a locked room crime is that the perpetrator is a dangerous, supernatural entity capable of defying the laws of nature by walking through walls or vanishing into thin air.

[1][2] However, Robert Adey credits Sheridan Le Fanu for "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" (1838), which was published three years before Poe's "Rue Morgue".

Van Dusen;[3] and Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), written in 1907 by French journalist and author Gaston Leroux.

[3] Pulp magazines in the 1930s often contained impossible crime tales, dubbed weird menace, in which a series of supernatural or science-fiction type events is eventually explained rationally.

Notable practitioners of the period were Fredric Brown, Paul Chadwick and, to a certain extent, Cornell Woolrich, although these writers tended to rarely use the Private Eye protagonists that many associate with pulp fiction.

However, celebrated writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Clayton Rawson, and Sax Rohmer have also had their works adapted to comic book form.

The most prolific creator of impossible crimes is Edward D. Hoch, whose short stories feature a detective, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, whose main role is as a country physician.

The book's plot suggests that Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while a guest at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble.

The Hardy Boys novel While the Clock Ticked was (originally) about a locked and isolated room where a man seeks privacy, but receives mysterious threatening messages there.

The eponymous protagonist, Jonathan Creek, designs magic tricks for stage magicians, and is often called on to solve cases where the most important element of the mystery is clearly how the crime was committed, such as a man who allegedly shot himself in a sealed bunker when he had crippling arthritis in his hands, how a woman was shot in a sealed room with no gun and without the window being opened or broken, how a dead body could have vanished from a locked room when the only door was in full view of someone else, etc.

In the 21st century, examples of popular detective series novels that include locked-room type puzzles are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larssen, Bloodhounds (2004) by Peter Lovesey, and In the Morning I'll Be Gone (2014) by Adrian McKinty, while locked-room puzzles are a major plot point and discussed at length in the visual novels Umineko When They Cry, Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies.