The Mystery of The Yellow Room - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Miss Stangerson is found alone and severely injured, moments after being violently attacked in a locked room at the Chateau, a room with absolutely no possible means of escape for the would-be murderer. Or so it appears. Joseph Rouletabille, journalist/detective, is immediately thrust into the investigation of the insoluble crime that would soon electrify all of France. Rouletabille, a mere eighteen years old, is very much in the tradition of Poe's Dupin, believing rational analysis, rather than crawling on all fours around the crime scene, is the key to unraveling those cases that are genuine puzzles, as this one is. (Not that Rouletabille disdains mundane forensics when called for. And when he chooses to crawl about, he does so with a most discerning eye!)

There are in fact no fewer than THREE apparently impossible vanishings by the assailant, each with a different, quite ingenious, explanation. The first, the only one which occurs in the classic locked room, turns out not to be a true disappearance at all, because, as Rouletabille deduces in a dazzling display of inexorable logic, the assailant was never in the room when it was actually locked, no matter how certain it seemed that he was. In a complicated sequence of events, the attack actually occurred many hours earlier than supposed, around 6 PM—but the audible gunshot and the cry of "Help, murder!!!", which happened after midnight in the locked room, were merely the acting out of a nightmare by Miss Stangerson, as she relived the earlier attack. Her severe injuries were inflicted not by the attacker but by Miss Stangerson herself, stumbling over furniture still overturned from the attack and violently striking her head.