[PW] unusual murder weapons

[Dennis Lien]

Thought of another one not on the list: in THE WEIGHT OF THE EVIDENCE
by "Michael Innes" the victim is crushed under a meteorite (not a
free-range meteorite but one liberated from a geological exhibit or
somesuch).

Of course, in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Engineer's Thumb" the
victim narrowly averts being murdered by being trapped inside an
industrial pressing machine (but there's a clear indication that
the machine had claimed one previous victim before the story opens).
I don't know if murder by harpoon (in "Black Peter," another Holmes
story) counts as unusual enough or not.

A Cornell Woolrich tale, "The Room With Something Wrong,"
involves a hotel room which seems to encourage people sleeping
there to rise and throw themselves out of the window to their
death; the solution involves an improbably-gimmicked bed.

And I'm racking my brains trying to remember an "impossible crime"
short story (possibly one of Edward Hoch's "Simon Ark" stories) in
which two men walk into a small depression while others watch and
one of them apparently suffocates in the open air while the other
is unharmed (there had been some earlier talk of a curse that would
so kill the victim).  SPOILER ALERT for solution below
Does anyone recognize the story?

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu


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The depression was temporarily full of some sort of poison gas that was
much heavier than the surrounding air, so it didn't "leak out" -- the
victim, who was quite short, breathed in the gas but his companion, the
killer who lured him there, was much taller and thus was "out of reach."

Sounds silly in summary, but I recall being taken with it when I read it
years ago...