Locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories have continued to be written ever since, and the late Bob Adey, the supreme expert on the subject, listed over two thousand of them. But the inherent artificiality of the locked room puzzle has meant that at times, it's been in the doldrums, at least so far as critics are concerned. Howard Haycraft, a generally shrewd critic, was advising writers against this type of story way back in the 1940s, even at a time when John Dickson Carr was still at his peak!
Fortunately, despite the vagaries of critical fashion, people have continued to enjoy reading locked room mysteries - and indeed writing them. And now they are very much back in favour - so much so that publishers scramble to label crime novels as 'locked room mysteries' when really they are no such thing! I've written some locked room/impossible crime short stories (a couple of them long ago, before the current vogue for them) and I've also included locked room sub-plots in a couple of the Rachel Savernake novels, Blackstone Fell and Hemlock Bay.
But I've never written a full-scale locked room mystery novel. One young writer has, however, emerged in the past few years who does just that. This is Tom Mead, author so far of four novels as well as some equally entertaining short stories - I wrote an introduction to his enjoyable collection The Indian Rope Trick, published by Crippen & Landru. He also wrote an excellent story which I included in Midsummer Mysteries.
His latest novel, The House at Devil's Neck, published by Head of Zeus in the UK, is possibly his most accomplished book to date. It's another case for Joseph Spector and again the plot is extremely intricate - but fairly clued, and with cluefinder footnotes, I'm delighted to say. Like John Dickson Carr, Tom achieves many of his most successful effects through the creation of a suitably macabre atmosphere, and the eerie nature of the eponymous house and its setting on an island with a causeway to the mainland is well evoked. He also shows considerable skill in misdirecting the reader's attention away from vital information in the text. I've often thought that the locked room concept works best in the short form, but this novel shows that, as in Carr's day, there are some very agreeable exceptions to the 'rule'. Great fun.
