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entered. Yet there are dead bodies inside; the thing happened even though it couldn't possibly have happened.
    The police are baffled—and baffled police are always good for the amateur detective—because they can't, in that most nineties of cliches, think outside the box. A person couldn't have scaled the walls and entered the room—but what if the murderer isn't a person? (No, we're not talking supernatural agencies here; if you don't know who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue, find a collection of Poe stories, because some things you have to experience for yourself.)
    Locked Room Mysteries aren't the only venue for the "impossible made possible" strain of mystery plot construction. Any murderer who fakes an alibi is creating an "impossible" situation—nobody can be in two places at once—and making it "possible." In the same vein, a killer who creates the illusion that his victim is alive after the murder has been committed also makes the impossible possible.
    The second principle, "the obvious made obscure," is another linchpin of the detective story. In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin is called in when the French police fail to find an important letter they know is hidden in an apartment. They've lifted floorboards and axed into walls, they've taken apart the stove and looked inside every book in the library, but they haven't looked in the one place that seems too obvious, too stupid, too mindless to constitute a successful hiding place.
    "Hide in plain sight" will be one of the main methods of clue concealment we'll discuss later in this book. It's your job as the mystery writer to create clues leading to the identity of the murderer and then to conceal those clues in a way that fools the reader without making a fool of him.
    That Was Then, This Is Now_
    "Okay, so Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story and got an award named after him. What docs that have to do with my writing a mystery novel in the twenty-first century?"
    Plenty, if only because that original template for the tale of detection is imprinted on the brains of everyone who ever reached for a library book because it had a little red skull stamped on the spine. The mystery reader opens a book with certain expectations, and the writer who knows what those expectations are can give the reader what she wants in a way that delights and surprises her.
    What's happened to the mystery since Holmes hung up his deerstalker and started keeping bees? For one thing, it split into three distinct strands, all of which are still very much in evidence on the bookstore shelves.
    The Classic Whodunit
    Poet and mystery reader W.H. Auden called it "the dialectic of innocence and guilt." Today's fans call it the "cozy," meaning no disrespect but expressing perfectly that feeling readers of the traditional mystery get when they pick up a new whodunit, go home and make tea, and wrap themselves in a physical quilt as well as the metaphoric quilt of a story they know will have a happy ending.
    The happy ending—okay, "happy" may be going too far—the positive ending, the ending that brings justice to bear on a violent situation, the ending where reason triumphs over evil; that's the ending classic readers are looking for.
    Why? Because ever since Poe, the classic tale of detection has meant restoring order to a world that was once well ordered but lost that serenity through violent death.
    Auden calls the scene of the crime before the murder is committed "the great good place." It is the English village, the manor house, the theater, the university, the monastery, any place that thrives upon stability and hierarchy. Into this idyllic world step not one, but two undesirables: the killer and her victim. The killer rids the great good place of the victim; it's up to the detective to flush out and remove the murderer and restore goodness.
    Subgenres of the traditional mystery include:
    The Regional Mystery The old-time traditional whodunit placed little emphasis on