Great collection of locked room mysteries. Best read one at a time with a break between stories to really savour each one.

This ARC was provided to me via Kindle, Penzler Publishers and by #NetGalley. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

Mystery stories, suspenseful, entertaining and fun.

This book was sent to me electronically for review from Netgalley. Mysteries...stories...who did it? Why? Likable characters usually...solve the mysteries...enjoy this book...

This is a fantastic introduction to the locked room mystery, which is so often confused with similar but distinctly different subgenres (e.g. impossible crimes, etc.)

The introductions were fantastic and the choices were well-thought-out.

Otto Penzler's curated anthologies of classic mystery fiction are always a delightful combination of stories I've read and others that are completely new to me, and I suspect that this is true for other readers as well. This anthology feels a bit more hit-or-miss than some of the others, but it's still a very good collection of locked room stories, with highlights being tales by Mignon Eberhart, Ellery Queen, and Cornell Woolrich. The Queen is especially noteworthy for the fact that it's written in such a way as to make the reader overthink the solution, while the Eberhart offering features some excellent characterization.

Not all of the pieces hold up particularly well in terms of time passed since they were written, but neither are there any horribly racist stories in the book, which may well have taken some careful curation on Penzler's part. (Sexism is alive and well in several stories.) Mostly readers who aren't accustomed to stories from the early-to-mid 20th century could find themselves lost in outdated terms and tech; one story takes place in an automat while another relies heavily on a telephone switchboard. There's also not quite as many lost gems in this collection as in others, with a fair amount that I'd encountered in other books before. Having them all in one volume together, however, is very nice.

All in all, this is a very nice addition to the available reprints of Golden Age mystery stories. I could see it used in a classroom or book club setting just as easily as for personal enjoyment, and even if it isn't the best of Penzler's anthologies, it's still well worth picking up.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penzler Publications for a copy of “ Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries “ for an honest review.
This is a whopper of a book that I have only got so far into , but rather than wait until the end of the book didn’t want to delay my review
I wasn’t sure if i would enjoy this as they were all American classics , and seemed a little dated, but I soon found myself intrigued by the plots.
As it is such a weighty selection of stories I think ,for me, it will work better if I read a mystery in between my other books to be reviewed.

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I have long been fascinated by locked room mysteries, though many have had mundane solutions. So it was with great anticipation that I read Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries, a collection of classic and lesser known stories from the 30s and 40s. They are all excellent, though a bit dated. Mr. Penzler’s introduction to the book and his brief biographies of the authors prior to each story are very informative. An outstanding collection!

The Seemingly Impossible…
A tremendous anthology once again from Otto Penzler. Following on from, the highly recommended, ‘Golden Age Detective Stories’ we are now treated to ‘Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries’ with fourteen seemingly impossible crimes. From the strange to the baffling and to the downright chilling, each tale with a set of carefully planted clues and even more carefully planted red herrings from both well known and little known writers of the Golden Age of Crime. Any aficionado of the Golden Age will devour with utter joy.

I've really enjoyed Penzler's American Mysteries Classics series and I was excited to see this anthology edition as an upcoming part of the series. Locked room mysteries are a foundational part of the mystery genre and this is a fantastic compilation of short examples of that genre. While there were, as always is the case in anthologies, some weird story picks (why would you ever start an anthology of locked room mysteries with Anthony Boucher's fantasic but really weird and not very mystery-ey Elsewhen - it should be saved for later in the anthology) I think for the most part this is a fantastic overview of the locked room mystery canon. My favorite was Ellery Queen's The House of Haunts which I had read before but never ceases to impress me. I also was excited and surprised to see Manly Wade Wellman's Murder Among the Magicians included in this volume. MWW is a master of his craft and the more that know of his work, the better. Ultimately, I strongly recommend this book and will excitedly alert the patrons of my library who enjoy classic mysteries to it's release.

This was such a good collection of crime stories by some authors that I recognised and others that I didnt. They were well written with compelling sotrylines and mysterious characters, The stories had a good level of suspense, twists and unpredictability and literally left me guessing. I was gripped the whole through and willbe recommending to everyone.