Alright Veeky Forums, how would you write a locked-room murder?

>victim presumed dead but not killed until later, e.g., by the first person to enter the room.

this one's pretty spicy

>Victim attaches revolver to a balloon and shoots himself
>Gun flies away
>Detectives try to solve the case for 500 pages
>In the last two sentences they just frame a black guy

Anyone else /prodigy/?

this one's fucking great

Killer also had the key

But will he ever pay for his crime.

they did that in a scooby doo episode

>everybody blaming each other
>suddenly the tall thin butler hits his head
>the high ceiling has been slowly but steadily moving downwards
>it was the room itself all along
>everybody gets slowly squashed
>heaving young heiress perforated by the chandelier
>even the doggos eyes burst out of his little skull as the ceiling moves down the last few inches, the dog already bathing in the intestines of the family and staff

Sounds like the plot to one of those islamic state short movies.

A witch did it.

So the victim got squashed too? How do they manage to blame it on each other?

t. Stephen King

this is actually pretty good
It would require some fine tuning, but the awesome thing about it is that all you have to do is put one person outside the room, and they're the murderer, yet that answer isn't too obvious, so the clever reader still has to dig and find the answer for themselves.

lmao

Ladders aren't cheap

When the young heiress was done taking her bath she saw 'you're going to die' written in the condensation on the mirror or something.

So the murder had not yet taken place but people were blaming each other for the intent since the heiress confronted her favourite servant since she was the only one that usually was in the bathroom with the heiress giving her her sponge baths and such and rubbing her feet, but the servant burst into threats and the heiress believed her.

The house itself wanted her dead and was willing to kill the rest as well. You see the heiress was planning to sell the house after her parents' death and spent the fortune on a scandalous and frivolous lifestyle rather than keeping up the estate.

She had already had conversations with a rich bourgeois buyer who wanted to turn it into his country house. The buyer, not present, was also blamed by the lord of the estate, father of the heiress, because when the heiress confessed her plan her father said that obviously the bourgeois buyer would have something to gain from scaring them out of the house quickly so he could buy it more cheaply.

But it was the house itself. The house and its past. The house with all its noble history would rather murder the entire family than end up as the house of some common pleb with a bunch of money.

The house would rather murder everyone in the family and staff and forever be shunned as a haunted house than turn into something it was not meant to be. Home to the deathbeds of more than a dozen lords, it could not accept a commoner.

I know it's a kind a guilty pleasure for some, but what are the best/the most well respected murder mysteries and locked room murders? I haven't ever read any.

Also, Hyouka got me interested

youtube.com/watch?v=d0BuKYiwhVQ

>The murderer must be someone in this room,—unless, he had very long arms.

There's tons of old classics like Doyle and Agatha Christie, but it's kind of a dead genre in the West. All the good contemporary stuff is almost exclusively Japanese VNs, like .

>>Make the heroine a woman
>making the woman a woman
what

>There's tons of old classics like Doyle and Agatha Christie, but it's kind of a dead genre in the West.
I've never read any of the classics - where/with who does one start? Where do I go after that.

Umineko is great though

The bare bones are Poe's Murder in the Rogue Morgue and Christie's And Then There Were None.

Hyouka is the GOAT, and you'll enjoy Umineko too.

could be a girl

>british 'humour'
riveting

Guess I'll start there, then.

Hyouka certainly is GOAT. Honestly, it took me by complete surprise how good it ended up being.

this is amazing

user if you do not write or make anything out of this i WILL steal it

>put one person outside the room, and they're the murderer
>not going full modernism and have the room being the killer

how the fuck can a balloon fly out of a closed room?

>turns out the narrator is the killer
>story has been told throughout in the third person, with no clue that there even was a narrator
>narrator was hitherto assumed to be a mute idiot, ignored by every other character
Has this been done?

>banquet
>lights go out
>lights come back on
>head of the table is suddenly dead with multiple stab wounds
>130 pages of whodunnit later
>everyone went over to stab him when the lights went out
>they all end up killing eachother before it's actually found out

I would rewrite Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" but make it novel length and take place in a single room

The balloon kicked down the door after murdering the man, obviously.

is it considered murder if it's in the guns nature to murder?
and can a gun murder if it lacks the morals to discriminate who it fires upon?
if a gun on a balloon shot a man and was arrested shortly after, would the gun undergo capital punishment or would the authorities simply put it in an evidence locker to gather dust until they frame the black man?
all questions on my mind, I must ponder them further...

They would find gunpowder in his hand.

>>Detectives try to solve the case for 500 pages
>>In the last two sentences they just frame a black guy

There's a bunch of stuff in Africa, although many are like between whodunnits and procedurals.

>would the gun undergo capital punishment or would the authorities simply put it in an evidence locker to gather dust
Scifi crime story idea: a police state run around the concept of locking people up without trial in some kind of stasis because they're "evidence"

It always makes me smile how ATTWN's original title was Ten Little Niggers

>Hyouka is the GOAT
>Hyouka certainly is GOAT.

how can anyone have such bad taste?

>>Victim attaches revolver to a balloon and shoots himself
holy

chimney you daft cunt

There's a Columbo with something very similar.

>victim died of suicide after misogynist bullying
>patriarchy deemed the killer
>book ends with society being arrested

...

Turns out he actually slipped and broke his neck

After several chapters of fruitful investigation, The suspects and detective are suddenly evacuated by police as that entire side of town goes up in an arsonist's blaze.

The detective revisits the scene of the crime countless times and travels across the country revisiting the suspects to their frustration, but on the 20th anniversary of the original attack, he arranges covertly for the suspects (who are still alive) to meet at his Uncle's villa so he can recreate the conditions and solve the murder, only the detective is killed just as everyone arrives.

It turns out he was killed by the arsonist, who joins the party and begins investigating the original murder after becoming enthralled by the detective's detailed case notes

That's quite cool. Reminds me of Memories of a Murder a bit.

Turns out the guy died from an accident but one of the suspects admitted he killed him, pleads guilty and gets executed.

It turns out the reader killed him by opening the book, turning the pages, and giving imaginative life to the story

Everyone assumes the the character named Victor Murdersly did it, but in fact, it was the reader who killed the victim

turns out that the victim was culture and the killer was global capitalism

And what's the locked room? Civilization?
Far out man.

you're on the right track

Aliens visit a dead earth before we achieve any significant amount of space travel and try to work out what killed us.

They have a hyper=aggressive matriarchy so they assume feminism, since they cannot believe that a man could do anything at all ever.

Too 90ies

Since Westworld's coming back in, just rewrite the whole Waxworld episode from Red Dwarf where they have to work out what's happening on a planet of historical figures murdering each other.

Back in the game

the point is that locking yourself away from global capitalism is impossible
>ends with society being arrested
monty python did it

He stole it!

The mystery becomes increasingly outlandish and seemingly unsolvable throughout the story as more and more elements are introduced, convoluting the plot to absurd extremes. In the end it turns out it never actually happened and the whole thing was the fabrication of a schizophrenic autist in a mental institution.

Read Beckett's Trilogy.

>Alright Veeky Forums, how would you write a locked-room murder?
i dont know

First you need to know what the locked room is. So choose one!

>Elaborate murder scene of detective's old friend or something
>Signs point to the detective doing the murder
>Twist is that the dead man took his own life and staged it to get the detective caught

>>Elaborate murder scene of detective's old friend or something
>>Signs point to the detective doing the murder
So many murderer mystery series have this that I think people are conditioned just not to suspect the investigator.

The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Except now instead of making it from the perspective of the detective, the perspective is from the detective's partner who isn't sure if the detective really did do it or not. Could pace the reveal to be later on in the story rather than the end of the first act like in most mystery books + movies.

First of all there's no murder, just a simpleton detective seeing and making connections which don't exist at all, but while investigating this non-murder he bumps into small time money laundering in a Chinese restaurant at Crawford Street, and what's our non-victim's name? Ah yes, Bistro Crawlforth! Now our detective is on to something... And then we travel back to the 1950's, deep into the Detective's childhood when he lived with his family in Nigeria doing missionary work and picking papayas for the poor and measly... and guess who's running the missionary operation? Yes, it's Potpourri Crawlston! Now we're getting close... or are we? To be continued.