Reckless Girls: A Novel

Locked-room mysteries, also called closed-door or impossible-crime mysteries, is a sub-genre of crime fiction that features a crime, typically a murder that occurs in a closed-off environment in which the murderer must be one of the individuals in the “locked room.” The central crime involves a situation in which the murderer could not have entered the crime scene and then left again or a situation in which none of the assembled characters have left the crime scene, rendering one of them the murderer. While locked-room mysteries often feature the investigation processes of detectives or citizen investigators, the mystery’s solution can also—as in Reckless Girls—be left to one of the novel’s primary characters to resolve. Typically, locked-room mysteries feature fast-paced plotting, moments of intrigue and betrayal, deceiving appearances, and a dramatic final climax. 

Locked-room mysteries are structured to create suspense and anxiety. One of their key conventions is the undetected presence of a violent individual with malign intentions who, because they have already committed one murder, threaten the safety of the group’s surviving members. In order to solve the murder, the novel’s protagonist must dig deeper into the lives of the other group members, exploring the ways in which those individuals might be covering up, or omitting, the darker aspects of their characters.

Locked-room novels have long been a key subgenre within the world of mysteries and thrillers. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is often cited as the first example of a locked-room mystery in a work of literary fiction, but locked-room mysteries also became a staple in texts meant for a wider readership, like the pulp magazines popular between the 1930s and 1950s. Their content, typically short or serialized works of fiction, centers on lurid and sensationalistic plots meant to both shock readers and keep them on the edges of their seats. The word “pulp” refers to the cheap paper on which they were printed and references the unpretentious quality of their writing. Locked-room mysteries, because of their atmosphere of heightened suspense, became a staple in pulp magazines and brought the subgenre to a mainstream readership. 

Many famous authors, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Dashiell Hammett, have penned locked-room mysteries, and Agatha Christie, in particular, is often cited as an exemplar of the subgenre. Her work And Then There Were None is a classic example of a locked-room mystery and continues to be popular among readers long after its publication and her heyday as an author. It remains the best-selling crime novel of all time and her best-selling title. The novel follows a group of characters invited to an isolated mansion on a dark and forbidding island as, one by one, they begin to die. It contains many of the elements common to locked-room mysteries, including the gulf between appearances and reality, the menacing presence of an unknown killer, and the gradual breakdown of group dynamics and individual well-being.