Original artwork of “The Locked Room Library”

I loved the original artwork that accompanied my short story “The Locked Room Library” that appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s July/August 2021 issue, and I’m so pleased that the artist, Laurie Harden, was open to selling it to me. Now I need to find a good spot for it!

That’s Sanjay and Tamarind on the right, next to a bricked-up door to nowhere, an important part of the story. “The Locked Room Library” is an impossible story that pays homage to John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen. 

Here’s the story set-up Laurie was illustrating: The owner of San Francisco’s Locked Room Library—a new private library established to celebrate classic mysteries—has discovered a secret about John Dickson Carr’s controversial novel The Burning Court. When a newly discovered letter Carr wrote to Frederic Dannay disappears under circumstances identical to one of the eerie impossible crimes in The Burning Court, it’s up to librarian Tamarind Ortega and stage magician Sanjay Rai (aka The Hindi Houdini) to prove the letter wasn’t stolen by a ghost who vanished through a bricked-up door.

All the characters are shown in library, along with the brick door to nowhere that holds the key to the mystery.