Closed circle mysteries have been one of my favorite tropes in mysteries ever since I was a child. Thanks to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and And Then There Were None, I loved the challenge of figuring out whodunnit when people are trapped in a small area. It’s a great way to ramp up the tension as people’s resentments and issues overflow like a kettle left on the hot stove for too long.
Take the closed circle trope and add in all the possibilities that science fiction can bring and you get a delicious mystery. Science fiction also has a lot of scenarios where people are in already close quarters from living on a spaceship or a planetary colony. People are far away from their own worlds, their friends and families and dealing with the existential crisis of empty space.
I found it interesting that many of these mysteries get called locked room mysteries, but closed circle and locked room mysteries are not the same. Locked room mysteries are when a seemingly impossible crime has happened in a locked room, like a dead body in a room where all the doors and windows are locked from the inside. Closed circle is when someone is murdered and all the suspects are stuck in a relatively small amount of space. The term might be shifting because locked room conveys the idea of being trapped in a locked room or locked situation.
So for all of murder mystery aficionados, here’s a list of six closed circle mysteries for you to reason your way out of.
The Last Murder at the Edge of the World by Stuart Turton
Turton has been on my automatic buy list ever since I read his debut The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is one of my favorite mysteries ever. After writing his homage to Agatha Christie and Golden Age mysteries in Evelyn Hardcastle and then his historical mystery The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton returns with his third novel in a dystopian future. It’s got great worldbuilding; a terrible fog has covered the Earth except for a single island where scientists developed a program to keep the fog at bay.
But there’s so much more to uncover about the island and its inhabitants, especially when a scientist ends up dead and her death triggers a fail-safe. There’s a sense of urgency as the characters try to figure out whodunnit before the fog kills everyone.
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
I read this one right after Evelyn Hardcastle and highly recommend the pairing. Imagine a future where death really isn’t the end. People can indefinitely clone themselves, awaking in new bodies with all the memories of their past lives, including their deaths. But what happens if you wake up with no memory of your death? That’s what happens to Maria Arena. She finds herself in a cloning vat with no memory of the events before her death. Her fellow crewmates also find themselves in their cloning vats with the spaceship sabotaged and no spare clones. Their murdered past selves are floating all around. I love how this book dives into the ethics of cloning; if you could clone yourself indefinitely, what rules would be necessary to keep society functioning?
The Launch Party by Lauren Forry
This feels like Then There Were None but it involves a creepy luxury hotel in space. Hotel Artemis may be the first hotel on the moon but it doesn’t shirk on luxury. Champagne, room service, you name it. Ten people are selected to be the inaugural group of guests at the hotel with promises of being wined and dined. But when they get there, they soon find they are the only ones there. For a luxury hotel, it’s odd that there are no staff members present to cater to the guests. When one of the guests is found dead, the remaining visitors realize that one of them must have killed them. Isolated and alone, it’s up to them to find the truth.
The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu
I’m a sucker for Shakespeare retelling so it was a slam dunk when I came across this work. It’s William Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a touch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Hayden Lichfield and his father were working on a formula that would change life and death forever. But when Hayden discovers his father’s corpse in the lab, he knows that he has to act fast to protect the research. Once Elsinore Labs goes on lockdown, Hayden works to find out who killed his father and why. It follows the plot of Hamlet to a point and dives into some fascinating discussions about guilt, obsession, and fear of death in a bioethical framework. Also it’s probably got the most interesting interpretation of the character Horatio, as the artificial intelligence computer with eyes and ears over the lab.
Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
I wanted to make sure to include a long term space voyage closed circle mystery in the list. What is more nightmarish than waking up from a long sleep to find that the spaceship supporting your life and 1000s of other people’s lives is going haywire and people died brutally? That’s what first mate Michelle Campion finds herself on the Ragtime spaceship on its 10-year voyage to the planet Bloodroot. Is it a matter of the work of a madman or are people dying for a specific reason? I loved reading how Campion had to work with unexpected allies to get to the bottom of this mystery.
The Dying Game by Asa Avdic
To end the list, we’ve got another dystopia where the world has been split up after the Second Cold War. I love the double blind closed circle with this one or a mashup of genres/tropes: spy novel, murder mystery and closed circle. Anna Francis finds herself tasked with helping to test six top candidates for a job in a top level intelligence position in a 48-hour challenge on a tiny island. She is supposed to pass herself off as the seventh candidate but stage her own death to see how the other candidates react. (What a mind trip to do this to begin with!) Things start to go wrong when she recognizes one of the candidates…and then the bodies start dropping for real.
That’s a list to get you started. I can’t wait to see what new science fiction closed circle mysteries get published in the near future.
Let us not forget Gideon the Ninth.
Two recommendations, one of an older and relatively obscure work, one for a much newer series:
First, Too Too Solid Flesh by Nick O’Donohoe is a closed-circle mystery involving a production of Hamlet performed almost entirely by androids; the creator of the androids is murdered and the Hamlet android sets out to solve the crime. An odd but fascinating novel, all the more so for having been published by TSR under its short-lived original fiction imprint. Most Web reference sources credit Wizards of the Coast as publisher; this is wrong, as this was before WotC had acquired TSR – I’ve just checked the print copy I was given for review when it first appeared. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a licensed ebook edition at present, but it seems to be findable in some of the major Web sources for OP material, and on the used-book market.
Now, then, let me introduce you to Gigi Pandian (author) and Tempest Raj (sleuth) in a new series of mysteries that’s very specifically an open homage to classic closed-circle and locked-room mysteries – to the extent that some of the secondary characters have a book club specifically devoted to discussing them. I’m enough of a mystery nerd myself to have read many of the authors mentioned; it’s possible some readers will be put off by the degree to which Pandian gets into genre history, but for my money I think she successfully walks the line between homage and class lecture.
Tempest, meanwhile, is the youngest in a multi-generational and multi-ethnic family of trained stage magicians (one side is Scottish, the other from India), but Under Lock & Skeleton Key opens just as her flourishing Las Vegas show has been sabotaged, so that she’s returned to her family home in California to help with her father’s construction business – which, given the family’s heritage, specializes in building secret rooms and hidden passages into people’s homes.
I had already been a fan of Pandian’s based on her prior work, but this series pushes even more of my buttons – the characters sparkle, the openly genre-savvy premise works very well indeed, the puzzles are ingeniously constructed, the cross-cultural elements are exceptionally well executed, and the extended arc involving a supposed family curse is woven neatly into the fabric of the individual books (four volumes to date, one an interstitial short story, with a fifth announced).
So glad you mentioned “Too Too Solid Flesh.” I’ve loved that book since it came out in the 80s.
I can’t remember if I read this one or meant to and didn’t get around to it. Pandian’s other series are good though
And on my screen, the links appear to work but something is wrong with the line breaks. This never happened with the old software….
(signed, Curmudgeons R Us)
I really enjoyed a novella called And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker.
A quantologist named Sarah Pinsker has recently proved the existence of the multiverse and this novella is set at SarahCon, a convention held in an alternate-reality resort hotel for of hundreds of Sarah Pinskers from different worlds
And then there is a murder.
this is hurting my head. I recognized the title and author, and I know I at least started reading that issue of Uncanny. but I can’t remember any of the story. guess I’ll just have to reread it. darn.
I am not sure about the Science fiction version of Hamlet. I am skeptical