"Locked-room" mysteries

Yesterday evening my wife and I participated in a discussion group at our local library; the topic was "favorite mysteries."  I offered two suggestions.  The first was any of the John Dickson Carr locked-room mysteries.  Carr was an American author from the classic era of the 1930s, who spent time in England and wrote somewhat in the British style.  His claim to fame is that of being the acknowledged master of locked-room murders.

In 1981 seventeen well-known authors and reviewers of detective fiction were asked to rank the top "impossible crime" novels.  The fourteen highest-rated novels are shown at this link.  Five of them were written by John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as "Carter Dickson").  The highest-rated book  was "The Three Coffins" (published in England as "The Hollow Men):

One wintry night in London, two murders are committed in quick succession. In both cases, the murderer has seemingly vanished into thin air.

In the first case, he has disappeared from Professor Grimaud's study after shooting the professor—without leaving a trace, with the only door to the room locked from the inside, and with people present in the hall outside the room. Both the ground below the window and the roof above it are covered with unbroken snow.

In the second case, a man walking in the middle of a deserted cul-de-sac at about the same time is evidently shot at close range, with the same revolver that killed Grimaud and only minutes afterward, but there is no one else near the man; this is witnessed from some distance by three passersby...

I collected and read all the John Dickson Carrs about 15 years ago, and have saved them all on one bookshelf, looking forward to the day when I've totally forgotten the solutions and I can read them all again.  That day has probably already arrived, but I'm busy blogging now.

I collected the books as tattered used paperbacks by scouring dozens of old used-book stores.  I quite prefer the old paperbacks not just because they're cheap, but because the cover illustrations (sometimes with maps on the back cover) are so good.  There is a wonderful assemblage of John Dickson Carr covers at The Cover Browser.

For a list of 99 locked-room mysteries, go to The Locked Room Library.

The other suggestion I offered at the book discussion group was Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, which I now realize I've not blogged yet.  Perhaps tomorrow.