Mystery fans love ingenious misdirection in their plots, and novels can be even more mysterious when the setting itself adds layers of intrigue. Creepy old buildings have a long history in mystery fiction, and the novels I’m diving into today use architecture as a key part of the puzzle.
I started thinking about architectural misdirection as its own type of deception when I began writing my Secret Staircase mysteries. Tempest Raj is a former stage illusionist who’s now using her sleight of hand skills working for Secret Staircase Construction, a home renovation company that builds magic into peoples’ homes through elements like sliding bookcases and hidden libraries. When seemingly impossible crimes happen, the architecture is connected to the solution—but always playing fair with the reader.
Here are five mystery novels that employ what I like to think of as architectural misdirection, giving the reader puzzles that are elevated through devious architecture at the heart of each story.
The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
In this closed-circle mystery originally published in Japan in the 1980s and only recently translated into English, members of a university’s mystery club have gathered on a secluded island where brutal murders had previously taken place. The novel is consciously an homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and the characters’ nicknames pay homage to classic mystery novelists as well, including Ellery, Carr, Poe, and Agatha. The students’ lodgings on the island are at Decagon House, a strange house shaped like a decagon, with disorienting rooms that play into the puzzle the students must solve to stay alive.
You Are Fatally Invited – Ande Pliego
I was wowed by this debut novel, a closed circle mystery set on a secluded island in a house that feels like it’s straight out of the board game Clue, and it’s another nod to And Then There Were None. A famous, anonymous author is hosting a writing retreat at his own private island, but all of the invited writers have secrets they’ll do anything to hide. Trapped together in an old maze-like house, they’re forced to solve riddles if they ever hope to escape.
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
This classic novel is dominated by a medieval abbey’s labyrinthine library that’s filled with secret passageways and hidden rooms. Friar William of Baskerville and his apprentice are investigating the mysterious deaths of several monks at the abbey, and the architecture both provides clues and mirrors the deeper symbolic meaning behind the crimes.
Murder in the Crooked House – Soji Shimada
In this locked-room mystery by the author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, a house located on the remote northern tip of Japan has been purposefully designed to appear crooked. For what purpose? In addition to the sloping floors and stairways to nowhere, frightening masks and unsettling dolls accentuate the uncanny setting. Perception is skewed inside this house, and it’s the key to revealing the secrets of the mystery.
The Burning Court – John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr is a master at creating believable solutions so seemingly impossible crimes that seem to have supernatural causes. One of the things that makes his locked-room mysteries so compelling is the frightening atmosphere he creates—and in The Burning Court, architecture is a central element in the eerie novel. Impossible crimes at both a crypt and a centuries-old house look like they can only be explained by witchcraft. A woman is seen vanishing through a door that was bricked up centuries before, and a body vanishes from a sealed crypt. Yet of course the master of the locked-room mystery wraps things up with a rational explanation.
The Library Game – Gigi Pandian
In my new Secret Staircase mystery, The Library Game, a mansion is being transformed into a library devoted to classic detective fiction. There are sliding bookcases aplenty, but none of them reveals the dead man everyone in the library saw only moments before. How has the house hidden a missing murder victim who never left?
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There’s a body in the library—and everyone is a suspect.
Tempest Raj and Secret Staircase Construction are renovating a classic detective fiction library that just got its first real-life mystery. When the library’s new owner hosts a murder mystery dinner, the rehearsal ends with a locked room murder and a vanishing body. Fueled by her grandfather’s Scottish and Indian meals, Tempest and the crew must figure out who is making beloved classic mystery plots come to life in a deadly game.
