The Locked Rooms
A body in a sealed chamber. No way in, no way out. For the connoisseur of the impossible crime, these are the primary targets — and every one of them is free.
The "miracle problem" is the genre at its most theatrical: a murder that could not have happened, solved by an explanation that — in retrospect — could not have been anything else. The four writers below built the form's foundations, and copyright has now let them go.
Gaston Leroux
Better known for The Phantom of the Opera, Leroux also wrote what many still call the finest locked-room novel ever published.
Israel Zangwill
The writer who, in 1892, produced the first major locked-room novel of the modern era — and parodied the form even as he founded it.
Jacques Futrelle
Creator of Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen — "The Thinking Machine" — in short, punchy stories that are pure logic puzzle. Futrelle died on the Titanic, having reportedly given up his seat in a lifeboat.
Noël Vindry
A French examining magistrate and a master of the locked room, often called the "French John Dickson Carr." His work entered the public domain in 2025 — and English translations have only recently made him findable to Anglophone readers.
Note: the original French texts are public domain. Recent English translations are under their own, separate copyright — see the legal notes on translation.
✦ Want more impossible crimes?
R. Austin Freeman, S. S. Van Dine and Chesterton's Father Brown all turned the trick from time to time — find them among The Authors. The undisputed grandmaster of the form, John Dickson Carr (d. 1977), remains under copyright in the EU until 2048.