For various external reasons, the selection process took longer than I expected, and now one month turned into three. However, the result is exquisite, and now it’s finally time to pick the New Locked Room Library!
Each participant of the first stage (and there were sixteen of them in total) will in the next few days receive the complete chart of the works selected by everyone. The chart will contain an empty “Pick” column, where each of you should put one of two options: “Y” (including) or “N” (not including). However, it is not permitted to put “Y” for the works you have not read! It is perfectly okay to put other signs, such as “-” or nothing, to visually demarkate unread works from the consciously not selected ones, but in the final count these will be considered equivalent to “N”.
In any case, there should be sufficient time to experience all of the works included: we set the preliminary timeframe for the second round to be 6 months, May 1st – October 31st, with the possibility of moderate extensions, if needed. It is currently planned that each work with 4 votes will enter the final New Locked Room Library, while each work with 6 votes will join the top section of it.
For the convenience of the participants, a “Comments” column is provided in case they wish to explain their reasoning in more detail, both for the works chosen and rejected (please tell me individually whether it would be okay to select some of your comments for the final release!). Before the end of the deadline, I will be expecting the filled-out copies of the chart back, after which I will make the final count. It is perfectly okay to discuss your choosing process before the deadline, if you wish so: for example, feel free to post about the works from the list on your own blogs!
The chart includes the IA, Amazon and other links in order to facilitate the search for the stories for you. However, in trickier cases please contact me!
Additionally, if, during the process, you suddenly realize there is some work wrongly absent from the chart – or maybe a new work or translation is issued during the selection process and immediately requires being entered – please inform me at once with argumentation, so that I could, if worthy, include such a work into the table!
Now some statistics for the curious. The selection contains 571 works in total: 277 novels (+2 only available in TV adaptations), 171 short stories (+7 only available in TV adaptations), 59 manga entries, 26 whole games or game segments, 9 individual TV episodes, 7 novellas, 4 anime episodes, 4 radio plays (guess which author monopolizes this one), 2 interlocked short story collections that were too tightly bound to split them, 2 fanfiction works, and 1 (animated, by the way) film. We are going to trim this selection to a manageable size. For comparison, the previous Locked Room Library contained 113 books, even though they had no short stories or other formats.
One more detail: there are some works that have a tendency to crop up in similar lists but will not be found in the current one. The thing is: these rightly famous works do not contain impossible crimes at all – at least according to the definitions in the previous post! I will not give the titles here, as that would be spoilers, but the participants will surely notice them being missing.
I will not be providing the count of how many people selected each individual work; in fact, this had not even been counted. One is sure: Death of Jezebel absolutely dominated, being the only work that had been introduced by almost every single participant.
Good luck!
The Detection Collection 