10 Best Locked Room Mysteries Of All Time

Published Nov 3, 2026, 1:00 PM EST

Yuliya Geikhman has been writing professionally for over 17 years. She started out in the MMO scene with Pando Media Booster and now dives into everything gaming at Screen Rant. She's a lifelong gamer, a relentless industry sleuth, and a passionate follower of everything happening in the games industry.

Part of the fun of any good murder mystery is figuring out who the murderer is. There's nothing quite as satisfying as getting all the clues lined up and trying to beat the detective to uncover the culprit. Sometimes, though, figuring out how the crime was committed is even more intriguing.

Locked-room mysteries are a special subgenre of mysteries that places the focus on the howdunnit as much as the who. In these stories, the murder happens behind closed doors, with the room often locked from inside and no way for the killer to get in or out. Some of the most creative murder mysteries have come out of these locked room mysteries, giving us classic tales from around the world with some ingenious resolutions.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie (1926)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (available for purchase here) is one of the most famous examples of a locked-room mystery. Poor Roger Ackroyd comes across evidence of a crime and a blackmailing scheme. Before he can uncover it to the world, he's stabbed to death in his study.

This mystery pulls Agatha Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot out of retirement. Poirot's little grey cells will have to work twice as hard to figure out not just who committed the crime, but also how.

Another famous example of a locked-room mystery from Christie is Murder on the Orient Express (available for purchase here), which takes place aboard a train. The setting itself becomes a locked room when a murder turns every passenger into a suspect.

The Decagon House Murders

Yukito Ayatsuji (1987)

While some closed-room mysteries take place inside a literal room, an entire island becomes the crime scene in Yukito Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders (available for purchase here). A group of detective writers gather on an island for their club meeting, but they're about to get their sleuthing skills put to the test.

When the writers start to be killed off one by one, the writers start to turn on each other. Either someone is on the island, or one of them is the killer... right? The solution to this Japanese locked-island mystery might be even more clever than you expect.

The Three Coffins

John Dickson Carr (1935)

John Dickson Carr is one of the classic mystery writers from the genre's golden era, and one of his most famous works was The Three Coffins, aka The Hollow Man (available for purchase here).

In this novel, Carr's larger-than-life detective Gideon Fell has to figure out how a doctor was shot from behind closed doors. But this is a two-for-one deal: the murderer also managed to kill a second time in the middle of a street with witnesses who saw nothing, and somehow leave no footprints in the snow.

The Murders In Rue Morgue

Edgar Allan Poe (1841)

The Murders In Rue Morgue (available for purchase here) by horror author Edgar Allan Poe is widely known to be the first murder mystery story to ever be published. It's also the first locked-room mystery, starring Poe's French detective C. Auguste Dupin.

Dupin is called in to investigate the strange and brutal murders of a woman and her daughter inside their Paris apartment: the mother is all broken up inside the courtyard and the daughter is strangled and partially inside a chimney.

The door is locked from the inside and the key is inside the lock. How could this happen? Dupin figures out the clever crime with Poe's characteristic edge of the grotesque and horrific.

The Adventure Of The Speckled Band

Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives of all time, and he's faced his fair share of creative mysteries. The antisocial sleuth gets a taste of the locked-room mystery in one of his most well-known stories, The Adventure Of The Speckled Band (available for purchase here).

Twin sisters sleep in a bedroom that's securely locked from the inside, with the windows shut tight and no way for a mortal to enter. And yet, somehow, one of the twins is killed overnight. Her sister turns to the great Shelock Holmes for help, in one of the most wonderfully convoluted mystery solutions in the detective's career.

The Canary Murder Case

S.S. Van Dine (1927)

Another great from the golden era of mysteries, S.S. Van Dine presents his own take on the locked-room mystery in The Canary Murder Case (available for purchase here). In it, detective Philo Vance investigates the death of a performer known as the Canary.

The woman is discovered by her maid in the morning: she's been strangled to death, her apartment's been searched, and her jewelry stolen. But this doesn't seem like a typical home robbery, especially when it turns out that one door was being watched and other was bolted from the inside.

Philo Vance uses his knowledge of the human mind and some good-old detective work to solve this tricky conundrum.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

Soji Shimada (1981)

An impossible crime occurs several decades before the events of Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (available for purchase here). An artist and amateur astrologer is found dead in his locked home.

It turns out he had been planning to create the perfect woman out of body parts, and after his death, someone carries out his plans by murdering and dismembering seven women—starting with the artist's daughter.

Many years later, an astrologer and his Watson-like friend try to solve the mystery once and for all. Readers are also invited to figure out the solution before it's spelled out in the book.

The King Is Dead

Ellery Queen (1952)

Ellery Queen was both the pen-name of the Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee writer duo, and the name of the detective in the long-running classic sleuthing series. The King Is Dead (available to purchase here) is the 23rd book in the series and, of course, a locked-room mystery.

Ellery Queen heads out to the private island of a man who also owns an entire army, navy, and airforce. The man's been receiving death threats, so Ellery hides him away to protect him, only for the impossible crime to happen, anyway. Ellery Queen failed to protect the powerful man, so now all he can do is solve the mystery and discover how he was shot while in hiding.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Gaston Leroux (1907)

Gaston Leroux isn't as widely known as some other big names in classic mystery writing, but he wrote one of the earliest examples of the locked-room mystery, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (available for purchase here).

Like in a typical example of the trope, newspaper reporter Joseph Rouletabille is pulled into a mystery where a crime happens behind closed doors. But Leroux goes an extra step and turns it into a puzzle for readers to figure out by providing them with detailed floor plans and information about the setting. The solution is satisfying, but not as satisfying as figuring out for yourself before you read it.

Death From A Top Hat

Clayton Rawson (1938)

Clayton Rawson departed from the usual detectives, reporters, and the like for his investigator, and instead went with a magician. The Great Merlini faces his first impossible crime in Death From A Top Hat (available for purchase here).

A doctor is strangled inside his own home (of course). Every door is locked and bolted from the inside (also of course), and each keyhole has fabric stuffed inside it for good measure.

The murder victim is found inside a chalk outline, surrounded by occult paraphernalia, making it seem like something supernatural is afoot. Luckily, Merlini's no stranger to contraptions and tricks, making him the perfect mind to figure out what happened.