wondered if there was room for a locked mystery in the classroom. And to start you thinking on this possibility, try out the challenge below.

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1 Newsletter #08 In this week s newsletter, we explore "locked room mysteries." Shimada Soji has made this type of mystery popular in Japan with stories like Tokyo Zodiac Murders. The mysteries often begin with an impossible murder for example, a man is shot dead on a snowcovered street and yet there are no footprints around him. Or a gun is delivered in a sealed envelope to the police station several minutes before the actual murder took place. Such mysteries are popular in TV shows and novels, but could they be used in the English-language classroom? To find out more about locked room mysteries, click here. The Perfect Mystery Make yourself a cup of coffee. Find yourself a quiet room. Close the door. Four walls, a door, a ceiling and floor a perfect place to relax? Perhaps not a closed room is one of the most popular places for fictional murders to take place. In his book, Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes, Robert Adey lists more than 2,000 examples of terrible crimes quoted from books, movies, TV shows and comic books.here are a couple of typical examples. Example 1: John Dickson Carr s book Three Coffins opens with a direct challenge to the reader. Themurderer is seen entering the room with his victim, but when witnesses break down the locked door, they find the victim dying and no trace of the murderer. Example 2: In her bookand Then There Were NoneAgatha Christie places ten people on an island. Instead of a locked room the characters discover that there is no way off the island. They are all murdered one by one and you must figure out how the murders are happening and who the murderer is. Adey s bookcontains page after page describing bodies found dead in castles, lighthouses, submarines and deserted houses. In all the examples, it is unimaginable that someone has killed the victim and yet all the victims are stone dead. Locked room mysteries have been popular for over 100 years (and that s not including the story of Bel and the Dragon in the Old Testament. In this story, a stone idol supposedly eats food offerings in a sealed room. The hero, Daniel, exposes the secret entrance used by the priests who take the food for themselves.)impossible crimes were popularized by brilliant fictional amateur detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle)and Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton). More recently the genre has become very popular in France and here in Japan, Soji Shimada s (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders) and some episodes of Detective Conanalso revolve around an impossible crime. With this in mind I

2 wondered if there was room for a locked mystery in the classroom. And to start you thinking on this possibility, try out the challenge below. All you have to do is match the solution to a mystery with the name of the novel it featured in. (Answersunderneath)

3 1. The emperor was not poisoned by mushrooms but by the feather stuck down his throat to make him sick when he had been convinced that he had been poisoned 2. Part of the Windmill Tower had been made to revolve so the exit lay over the cliffs, and the victims simply stepped out and fell to their deaths 3. The deceased stabbed himself with an icicle, which then melted, leaving no trace of the weapon 4. The victim fainted in the elevator but was then stabbed by the first person to enter the elevator 5. The audience is allowed to inspect the magician's cabinet before he steps inside and the curtain descends. When the curtain goes up again, the magician is still in the cabinet strangled. 6. The killer rents an apartment and then opens a box with radioactive materials and leaves. After the death of the victim in the overhead apartment, the killer returns and departs with the box. a) Kill Box by Michael Stark b)department of Impossible Crimes by James Yaffe c) Death by Black Magic Joseph Commings d) The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms by James Yaffe e) The Tea Leaf by Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace f) The Moving House of Foscaldo by Charles Chadwick Answers: 1. d), 2. f), 3. e), 4. b), 5. c), 6. a) Another possible idea for the English-language classroom would be to present the locked-room mystery and challenge the students to create a suitable ending. I have to admit that I couldn t think of any endings to a story, but this is where Robert Adey comes to the rescue. At the back of his book, Adey has the solutions to the crimes that have perplexed readers over the years. The list of solutions includes sliding doors, vicious cats with poisoned claws, batsthat knock daggers off shelves and identical twin brothers.with a list of possible solutions to choose from, students could work in pairs to come up with their own ending to a locked-room mystery that they could then present to the class. To prepare the students for this activity, I would suggest using The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. In chapter 17, the hero detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, gives a perfect introduction to solving locked-room mysteries. How, Fell asks, has the murderer managed to convince everyone that the room was sealed, when in fact

4 it was not. Fell provides several possible explanations of how this might be done, and here is just one of his simple answers. The murderer, after committing his crime, locks the door from the outside and keeps the key. The murderer then shouts, raises the alarm and smashes the glass panel of the door in front of witnesses. He then puts his hand through the broken panelwith the key concealed in it. Pretending to find the key in the lock inside, he opens the door. After reading Gideon Fell s explanations, the students would be ready to try their hands at creating the endings to suchmysteries. If you d like to read some modern-day locked-room mysteries, here are some recommendations for you: Paul Halter's The Seven Wonders of Crime has Detective Owen Burns dealing with a serial killer who models his murders on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Soji Shimada's Tokyo Zodiac Murders sets out how - 40 years before the novel starts - a mad artist has apparently butchered his family in an attempt to create the perfect woman. Jump forward to Can the crime be solved? Complete with maps and drawings of the crime scene, this book turned Japan on to the pleasures of the locked room mystery. An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room (Alice Arisugawa & Kazuichi Isoda) contains summaries in Japanese of 40 novels and short stories, 20 of which are Anglo-Saxon classics the other 20 being Japanese classics. A striking feature of the book is the double-page graphic explanation of each problem. The comic book, King Ottoman s Scepter, features a locked room mystery solved by Tintin.

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