Locked rooms, twisted

While they've become rather passé lately, locked-room mysteries have long been a staple of classic mystery. The form offers interesting opportunities for the ingenious author, but it's been so badly mangled by the less adept that the best of these snappy little puzzles are most often found overseas or wandering friendless in the used-bookstore desert. Thankfully the smarty-pants-wearing folks over at Soho Crime saw fit to reprint some of Patricia Carlon's work in their first US editions. The reclusive Australian author died in 2002, but the gems she wrote in the 1960s are as sharp as ever. Hence, today's twofer of psychological thrillers - Hush, It's a Game and The Whispering Wall.

Carlon takes the traditional mystery setup and turns it neatly on its head - rather than meandering through clues and suspects in pursuit of a tidy denouement, she lays out the villain's identity and the crime immediately and then builds almost unbearable tension and suspense out of a closed environment. In Hush, It's a Game, a parolee returns and murders the ex-girlfriend who put him away, not realizing that she's locked her young babysitting charge in the kitchen. Reading about little Virginia's struggles to understand what's happening and her efforts to break free results in a truly vivid scare because the tension all results from absolutely mundane misunderstandings and miscommunication. The theme of being unable to make other people see the danger emerges in an even more twisted way in The Whispering Wall. Here, Carlon casts the victim of a severe stroke as her heroine. Although she is paralyzed and unable to speak, Sarah Oatland can still hear and comprehend, a fact which she may come to regret as she overhears a murder plot through the thin walls of her home. Using only her wits, Sarah fights to warn the intended victim and protect herself from the plotters. Carlon achieves something of a masterstroke here - in her vivid depictions of Sarah's frustration and anger, she makes a fully realized character out of someone all observers would see as mostly dead if Sarah had existed in life.

Carlon's greatest strength is her ability to use entirely ordinary human behaviors (namely the tendency towards self-involvement and isolation) to create the chills and scares of her plots. It's easy to separate yourself from a typical serial killer novel because you know the odds of such a thing ever happening to you are about a jiggityjillion-to-one. But when the danger is solely due to other people's indifference, the fright becomes much more real. Her writing is creepy, but oh-so-good. Read these in the sun, and don't shut the door behind you.