Locked Rooms and Interpreting Readers: The Role of Embedded Texts in the Locked-Room Mysteries of Poe, Leroux, and Christie

by Stoermer, Carolyn E.

As closed narratives, locked-room mysteries risk the sense of interpretive play for which the larger detective genre is known. To mitigate this risk, writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux, and Agatha Christie incorporate embedded texts into their locked-room stories. These recreated documents encourage readers' involvement by eliciting culturally specific interpretive reactions. Studying how these authors' embedded texts simultaneously innovate and conserve within the locked-room subgenre brings critics closer to understanding exactly how the detective story earned its reputation as one of the most engaging forms of fiction.