The Mystery Of The Yellow Room
The Mystery of the Yellow Room: Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille, Reporter (in French Le mystère de la chambre jaune) by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. It was first published in France in the periodical L'Illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then in its own right in 1908.
It is the first novel starring fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille, and concerns a complex and seemingly impossible crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Leroux provides the reader with detailed, precise diagrams and floorplans illustrating the scene of the crime. The emphasis of the story is firmly on the intellectual challenge to the reader, who will almost certainly be hard pressed to unravel every detail of the situation.
Agatha Christie admired the novel and in her early years said she would like to try writing such a book. John Dickson Carr, the master of locked-room mystery, has his detective Dr Gideon Fell declare this as the 'best detective tale ever written' in his 1935 novel The Hollow Man. In a poll of 17 mystery writers and reviewers, this novel was voted as the third best locked room mystery of all time, behind The Hollow Man and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit.
The novel finds its continuation in The Perfume of the Lady in Black where a number of the characters familiar from this story reappear.
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Famous quotes containing the words mystery and/or yellow:
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)
“O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)