'Locked-room' mystery stories are fundamentally flawed, in that they require considerable suspension of disbelief just to accept their improbable scenarios, let alone their often even-more-improbable solutions, but once you accept all of this they become a lot of fun. This means that even though the quality of the stories in Classic Locked-Room Mysteries vary, the book itself is consistently entertaining.

After a great introduction from David Stuart Davies, who compiled this 2016 collection, which summarises an interesting tale from Herodotus and provides useful colour on the various authors included in the volume, Classic Locked-Room Mysteries actually begins unpromisingly, with the unspectacular 'The Aluminium Dagger'. It then proceeds to Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' which, although it deserves immense respect for practically inventing the detective genre and its formula, has a solution which is pretty silly to modern readers.

Fortunately, the book then proceeds to a quintessential 'locked-room' story in Jacques Futrelle's 'The Problem of Cell 13', complete with deductions, conundrums and outlandish solutions. The next story is a real and surprising gem, Lord Dunsany's 'The Two Bottles of Relish'. I won't spoil its rewards, but it unfolds fantastically and its success whets the appetite for the rest of the book. With this goodwill built up, Jepson & Eustace's 'The Tea Leaf' proves entertaining and has one of the best solutions of the collection. Things then dip slightly with Howel Evans' 'The Mystery of the Taxi-Cab'. Wilkie Collins' 'A Terribly Strange Bed' is a better story for its atmosphere than for any ingenuity, as is Hodgson's 'The Thing Invisible'.

A Sherlock Holmes story is always welcome in any company, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Retired Colourman' is effortlessly rewarding even if its not Holmes at his absolute best. David Stuart Davies then uses his editorial remit to insert his own story, 'The Curzon Street Conundrum'. This inevitably feels more modern than the other (classic) stories, even if it is set in the same period. But though it seems out of place, it doesn't feel inferior by any means.

The best is now past, and the rest of the book is just for the reader to indulge in the concept of the locked-room. Aldrich's 'Out of His Head' is curious, and Melville Davisson Post's 'The Doomdorf Mystery' is the best of this late sequence of stories. The American West setting of 'Doomdorf' is a nice change of pace from the British parlour-room atmosphere of most of the other selections, and its solution to the locked-room murder as delightfully far-fetched as any of the others.

The Williamsons' 'The Adventure of the Jacobean House' passed me by, unfortunately, though G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown story 'The Invisible Man' redeemed this with some quality writing. That said, Chesterton's solution seemed the most unlikely of the lot. The collection ends with the return of Jacques Futrelle, the only author included twice. 'The Motor Boat' isn't a locked-room story, making it an unusual inclusion, but it's a fun mystery regardless.

All told, Classic Locked-Room Mysteries does exactly what it says on the tin. There's just something satisfying about stories like this; figuring out how someone was murdered in a room locked from the inside, or escaped from a cell. The stories are, by-and-large, well-chosen and sequenced well and the book will entertain any willing reader throughout. ( )