Bodies in a Bookshop – RT Campbell (1946)

It seems that this will be the second installment of my “I thought that this was a locked room mystery, but was mistaken” series.  I read this entire book thinking that it was featured on the Roland Lacourbe list of top impossible crimes, and was a bit stumped about how this could be considered a locked room mystery.  In hindsight, I believe that I bought this book around the same time that I acquired T.H. White’s Darkness at Pemberley (which is featured on the list), the books sat together on my TBR pile, and over time my mind got mixed up.

Bodies in a Bookshop does actually feature a murder in a locked room, but eschewing impossible crime tradition, the room is locked from the outside.  Two men are found dead in the backroom of a bookshop, having succumbed to a leak from a faulty gas ring.  There’s a bit of a question as to why the men didn’t simply open a window, and foul play is somewhat obvious given that the office door was latched from the outside.