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The 12 stories in this carefully-assembled collection reflect the history of the locked room mystery story. Beginning with the grandfather of the genre, Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" featuring the great Sherlock Holmes, the reader will move on into the twentieth century, and be entertained by such modern masters as MacKinlay Kantor and Erle Stanley Gardner. The stories demonstrate the remarkable variety of the locked room puzzle: the scene of these impossible crimes might be a log cabin in the mountains, and it might be a big-city automat. The characters range from telephone operators to scientists to mystery writers themselves. contents - INTRODUCTION: "No One Done It" by Issac Asimov The Adventures of the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892) The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle (1905) The Light at Three O'Clock by MacKinlay Kantor (1930) Murder at the Automat by Cornell Wollrich (1937) The Exact Opposite by Erle Stanley Garnder (1939) The Blind Spot by Barry Perowne (1945) The 51st Sealed Room by Robert Arthur (1951) The Bird House by William March (1954) Big Time Operator by Jack Wodhams (1970) The Leopold Locked Room by Edward D. Hoch (1971) Vanishing Act by Bill Pronzini and Michael Kuriand (1976)