For the sake of this thread, I'm gonna refer to locked-room/impossible crimes as some sort of murder that outright couldn't have happened, but somehow did even though it looks like it defies logic and is generally explained at the end of the story.

It's generally much harder to create a good locked-room mystery in a setting that has magic, since it's harder to create impossible crimes when impossible is a pretty relative term.

In any case, any stories like that? Yeah, I realize that's something rather specific that's really hard to do correctly but...eh, figured it was worth a shot.

 

An interesting idea, but I've never seen it done. Probably because it's impossible in the Harry Potter world because there are no defined rules to magic.

 

I wouldn't say impossible, it would just take some creativity. For example, a wizard is found inside a locked room without his wand, with a dead body besides him. The body shows no sign of damage and was clearly killed by the killing curse. Yet, since the wizard didn't have his wand with him--or any wands for that matter--it becomes "He used magic to kill him, but how did he do it without his wand?"

And then there could be a reasonably clever plot where he used an ingenious device not depending on magic(the kind you'd see in a detective novel) to make sure his wand disappeared from the room and was found by some auror before they broke into the room with a spell. It would take some very careful alibi / wand discovery to make that plausible, but I can think of a few tricks that would work with it.

Alternatively, a man is killed by the killing curse inside his home--yet no magic was detected there, meaning magic could not have been used, but HAD to have been used somehow. The ministry and the muggle police are equally baffled, for different reasons. Auror Harry then goes Dr. Gideon Fell on the crime and explains how it happened.

A man is wearing a magical armor that protects him from almost any physical attack. He's seen walking down a road. A loud gunshot is heard and the man tumbles to the ground. The seemingly magical bullet went through his legendary armor, but upon closer inspection, it is actually a simple Muggle bullet.

I don't know, there are tons of ways to make locked-rooms work even in Potterland, so long as you are careful enough. Probably worth mentioning that the above examples would need some very specific circumstances in addition to what I cited(but that would take too long to describe in a quick post) to actually work.

...Goddamn it now that I keep listing ways to make a locked-room mystery happen I'm almost tempted to write one myself.

 

There's one in the WbA, but I can't remember who is writing it.

Something about Harry's body getting timeturned and portkeyed into Hogwarts. Because it was timeturned, the murder has to have happened at some point in the next twelve hours (or something similar).

At the time the body arrived, now!Harry was in the hospital wing. As were Pomfrey, Snape, and Daphne Greengrass. Dumbledore goes there too, and then locks the doors.

However, it hasn't updated in ages.

 

I agree; it's pretty hard to make a true locked room since magic can make you go through walls and ignore alibis. It is still possible to make a traditional locked room if you use a few specific plot devices, but then magic itself ceases to matter much. I was more or less using the John Dickson Carr definition of locked-room mysteries, which also counts impossible crimes as locked-room mysteries.

I actually haven't read your story yet, but thanks for linking me there! That looks exactly like the kind of thing I like to read about, I'll definitely check it out.

 

There's a story with Draco being on trial for "killing" Cho in such "locked" room situation and Harry comes back to defend him. I think its in Almost Recommendable, don't remember the name right now.

 

The difference between good fantasy mystery writing and HP is that in good fantasy mystery writing, the answer is never "a wizard did it", while in HP not only it always is, but there are an infinite number of ways it could have been done, and the reader never knows what is and what isn't possible. I suggest the Lord Darcy stories, including this locked room mystery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Many_Magicians

 

Thanks, will look for that.

I'm a big fan of the Lord Darcy stories, but thanks for bringing that up. That's going to give me an excuse to read it again.

I don't think there's an inherent problem with a wizard being the culprit so long as the reader is given a fair chance to figure out how he did it. That's problematic with Harry Potter's magic system because it...well, isn't really a system. It's so open that pretty much anything goes. But I think some good narrative could use a trick or two to make up for that.