The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

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.