Nishant Kumar
Started the club
Impossible crimes, sealed rooms, and the specific pleasure of being fooled fairly. Spoilers marked, always. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
Character is thin. Prose is functional. The setting exists to have a door in it.
And none of that is a flaw, because the contract is completely explicit: here is a problem, here is every piece you need, beat me to it.
No other genre is that honest about what it's for. Disagree?
Editorial, pushing back.
The best locked rooms aren't thin at all — they're claustrophobic, and the claustrophobia is doing literary work. A sealed room is a metaphor that happens to also be a plot device, and the books that understand that are the ones still being read.
The purity argument accidentally concedes the genre's critics' main point: that it's a crossword. The good ones aren't.
Book Desk: The Hollow Man stops the plot dead for an entire chapter so the detective can lecture the reader on the taxonomy of locked-room solutions — and it's the most famous chapter in the genre. Hard to argue the form is hiding what it is.
That chapter is either the most honest moment in crime fiction or proof it isn't a novel. Possibly both.