Locked-room mysteries constitute a subgenre of detective fiction that focuses on a crime committed in a space that is ostensibly inaccessible from the outside. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with initiating the subgenre with his short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In Poe’s story, detective Auguste Dupin solves the murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, which took place in a locked apartment. He ascertains that the perpetrator of the grisly crime (eventually revealed to be a razor-wielding orangutan) used a window that only appeared to be locked from the inside. While Eleanor’s would-be killer is far less outlandish than Poe’s criminal ape, her disappearance does present the protagonists with a difficult problem to solve.

In The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, Eleanor disappears from a locked room, and her attempted murder could only have been perpetrated by one among a relatively small group: the people she invited to her estate for Christmas. The author takes pains to emphasize the seeming impossibility of Eleanor’s disappearance from an apparently locked study when the slide-bar latch was engaged from inside. Ethan has to kick the door open, splintering the frame, before Eleanor’s guests can access the room. However, once Maggie begins finding clues that could only have been left by Eleanor herself, the situation is revealed to involve a prolific and detailed criminal mastermind—even if she only writes about crimes rather than committing them. Furthermore, the subgenre calls for “a limited number of suspects, such as strangers brought together onto a secluded island” (Pandian, Gigi. “Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes.” Sisters in Crime). In this case, Eleanor’s invitations bring these people together for the holiday, and her home might as well be a deserted island because of the winter storm that isolates it from the outside world.

Notably, The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year departs from convention in at least one significant way. Typically, “The locked-room mystery is a world in which the puzzle is the most important element. […] Writers of this genre are not interested in the psychology and morality of their characters. What they’re concerned with is the challenge of the crime and the thrill of solving it” (Salao, Cole. “The Locked-Room Mystery: Solving the Impossible Crime.” Killer Thrillers, 1 Oct. 2021). In Eleanor’s case, however, Maggie and Ethan know that someone is trying to kill her, but they also believe that Eleanor herself has created a series of clues based on her books and that these clues will lead a real fan directly to her. Therefore, their duty is two-fold. They must simultaneously solve the attempted crimes against Eleanor and examine Eleanor’s psychology, chasing the clues she left behind in even as they attempt to ascertain the identity of her would-be killer.