Preface -- Edgar Allan Poe and the detective story narrative -- The locked compartment: Charles Dickens's 'The signalman' and enclosure in The railway mystery story -- The body in the library: reading the locked room in Anna Katherine Green's The filigree ball -- G. K. Chesterton's enclosure of orthodoxy in 'The wrong shape' -- The hollow text: illusion as theme in John Dickson Carr's The hollow man -- Jorge Luis Borges and the labyrinth of detection -- The story is the writer himself: Paul Auster's locked room in City of glass -- The narrative of enclosure.