Throw Away the Key: Why Jack Heath Loves Locked-Room Mysteries

Jack Heath
6 days ago
2 min read

Author Jack Heath pens a piece for us about his love for writing locked-room mysteries.

Three thriller book covers by Jack Heath are displayed. Titles: "Kill Your Husband," "Kill Your Boss," and "Kill Your Brother."

I’ve always loved ultra-contained stories. As a child I read and re-read Class Trip, a slashery novel in which seven teenagers are stranded on a tiny island, and one is secretly a killer. In my teenage years I discovered Cube, a movie about six strangers who wake up in a maze (only one makes it out alive). Cube was probably my favourite film until I watched Saw, in which two men find themselves chained up in a bathroom with a dead body, a tape recorder, two hacksaws and a gun.

The settings and cast lists kept shrinking. I soon found Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds spends the whole movie trapped in a coffin, and Phone Booth, which was set in (you guessed it!) a phone booth. I love seeing how much a storyteller can do with how little. It’s like watching a brilliant artist at a tiny canvas. The borders are so clearly defined that it seems like there’s no room for any surprises—and yet, wow! I wasn’t expecting her to paint that.

While researching Kill Your Boss I talked to a few police officers, and learned that real-life criminal investigations cover dozens of kilometres and involve hundreds of people. In crime fiction, meanwhile, there can only be a small number of locations, because the writer only has three or four hundred pages to work with and can’t afford to waste them describing furniture. There also has to be a limited number of characters, since the reveal of the killer is most enjoyable when it’s someone the reader remembers from earlier, and that doesn’t work if there are thousands of characters.

The sweet spot seems to be about six: a detective, a sidekick, a victim, and three suspects, one of whom will be guilty (unless the sidekick did it, or the detective, or the victim themselves, or all of the above—the possibilities, while not endless, are expansive). This might be why, in some crime novels, the leads feel a bit too convenient. It’s a city of ten million people, the detective just happened to bump into the killer? Twice?

The locked-room, then, is not an artificial constraint. It takes the artifice away, along with the invisible coincidences most crime novels depend on. If there were only six people at the library at the time of the murder, of course one of them pushed the victim off the roof.

But which one? It still has to be a surprise. Let me grab my paintbrush.

Kill Your Boss by Jack Heath releases November 4.

Both Kill Your Husbands and Kill Your Brother are available in all good bookstores right now!