Since I'm still working my way through the mystery novels of John Dickson Carr, master of the Locked Room puzzle, I'm going to post this discussion of that plot device now.
In The Three Coffins, John Dickson Carr's detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, delivers a lengthy dissertation on the classic "locked room" or hermetically sealed chamber mystery. In that book, Dr. Fell is confronted with two apparently impossible murders, one in a locked room, and the second in the middle of an apparently empty street.
After dismissing such obviously unfair devices as secret passages and minor variations such as sliding panels or holes in the ceiling through which objects could be thrown or dropped, Dr. Fell breaks the legitimate locked room puzzle of an apparent murder in a hermetically sealed room from which no murderer escaped because no murder was actually in the room into seven classifications:
1. It is not murder but a series of coincidences ending in an accident that looks like murder. A robbery or struggle of some sort has occurred in the room before it was locked, the victim has locked the door and then fallen and hit his head on a piece of furniture or the ever popular iron fender that all British homes apparently had, and the struggle and head bashing are believed to have happened at the same time when in fact they happened at different times.
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death. This may be done by the power of suggestion or by the effect of a gas introduced from outside the room that causes the victim to smash up the furniture in an apparent struggle and then kill himself.
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the room, and hidden in some innocent looking piece of furniture. It may be a trap set by somebody long dead, and work either automatically or be set anew by a modern killer. He cites a lengthy list of deadly telephone and clock mechanisms, the bed that exhales a deadly gas, the weight that swings down from the ceiling or crashes into the back of your head from atop a chair, and endless innocent looking electrified devices from chessboards to tea urns that can electrocute a victim.
4. It is suicide, which is intended to look like murder. Victims stabbing themselves with icicles, or shooting themselves with guns attached to elastic cords that whisk the gun away from the body, and since no weapon is found nearby, murder is presumed.
5. It is murder which derives its problem from illlusion and impersonation. The victim, still thought to be alive, is already lying murdered inside a room, of which the door is under observation. The murderer, disguised as the victim, enters the room, whips off his disguise and immediately exits the room as himself, leaving the victim presumably alive inside the room.
6. It is a murder which, although committed by somebody outside the room at the time, nevertheless seems to have been committed by somebody who must have been inside. Dr. Fell calls this a Long-Distance or Icicle Crime as this often is the result of the murderer somehow firing an icicle or other soluble object into the victim from outside the room; since the weapon has melted away, the victim is presumed to have been stabbed by someone who then took the weapon away with him.
7. This is a murder depending on an effect exactly the reverse of number 5. That is, the victim is presumed to be dead long before he actually is. The victim may be lying asleep, stunned or drugged inside the locked room and the murderer uses that to suggest that he was dead some time before he is actually killed.
It was really a pleasure to read this list again and recognize plot devices used in stories by many authors, from Margery Allingham to Agatha Christie to Dorothy L. Sayers and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
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