[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

As a born contrarian, I can't stand either The Yellow Room ... or J.D. Carr's work ...

I haven't read many of Carr's books, but I have become more tolerant toward him than I used to be.

On a slightly more serious note, despite loving the "how to" treatise written by the acknowledged master of the genre, I have not found any locked room mysteries I read after it to have been in any spoiled for me.

I was thinking specifically of Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery. The book isn't named, but the author is (and as far as I can tell, this was his lone mystery novel), and we are told (in general terms) how the murder was performed and who (again, in general terms) committed it. I must have read The Big Bow Mystery right after reading The Hollow Man, so I still remembered that much of the "The Locked-Room Lecture" (chapter XVII), which functioned as a spoiler for me.

The "Lecture" also reveals how the murder is performed in Anna Katherine Green's Initials Only and in "one of the most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective fiction.... This is Melville Davisson Post's, The Doomdorf Mystery ..."

Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room is named ("the best detective tale ever written"), but the game isn't completely given away, though still more of it than I would have liked. (I must have read it soon after The Hollow Man, as well.)

The British author Tom Mead is a serious JDC afficionado and has written about him and written intros for some editions of JDC books. His own locked room novels I love - Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel

Thanks to your having mentioned the latter elsewhere, the former is on my ereader, anxiously waiting for me to get to it.