| The Mystery of the Yellow Room | |
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Cover of the 1908 first edition |
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| Author(s) | Gaston Leroux |
| Original title | Le mystère de la chambre jaune |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Series | Joseph Rouletabille |
| Genre(s) | Mystery fiction |
| Publisher | L'Illustration (in serial) Editions Pierre Lafitte (book) |
| Publication date | 1907 in serial January 1908 in book form |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback), Audiobook |
| Pages | 236 (1998 paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1-873982-38-0 (1998 paperback) |
| OCLC Number | 59584573 |
| Followed by | The Perfume of the Lady in Black |
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.
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.[1]
The novel finds its continuation in The Perfume of the Lady in Black where a number of the characters familiar from this story reappear.
Contents |
The crime takes place at the Chateau du Glandier, located in the forest, near the road leading to Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois and Montlhéry. The daughter of a famous scientist is found the victim of attempted murder. The strange thing is the room is locked from the inside and there are no other ways in. A police detective is involved but the young journalist Joseph Rouletabille is more concerned with unraveling the mystery by use of reasoning and logic.
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.
All the labyrinthine plot twists that follow, that so engage and tantalize the reader, are engendered, directly or indirectly, by a motive that certainly might appear quaint from the modern perspective. The case unfolds in the complicated way it does principally because Miss Stangerson withholds key information and at times actively thwarts the investigation (as does her fiance)--all in her zeal to conceal her connection with her assailant-- a youthful marriage to this man whose true, very sordid, identity and proclivities she didn't yet know. To a late 19th century "properly brought-up young lady" this marriage is grounds for profound scandal that would disgrace her beloved father, hence her determination to conceal it even at the risk of her life.
The revelation to the reader of the identity of the assailant (and now murderer, since a minor character is killed by him near the end) is highly dramatic and universally unexpected. One must presume that even that ingenious writer of mysteries John Dickson Carr was surprised, or else he would not have pronounced it the greatest detective tale ever written. It was one of the very early, and very skillful, instances of "the detective did it". Yes, the brilliant sleuth, the when-all-else-fails recourse of the Sûreté, the man commanding the relentless pursuit of the assailant of Miss Stangerson, Frederic Larsan, was in fact her assailant. (Still in love with her, he was determined to prevent her marriage by any means necessary.) And, the reader is dumbfounded to learn, Larsan is not merely her assailant but a notorious criminal of legendary exploits as well. In a final twist, Rouletabille arranges for Larsan to escape justice, in order to protect Miss Stangerson's secret from the inevitable disclosure a murder trial of Larsan would bring.
The plot, intriguing as it undeniably is, depends on the reader's acceptance of the plausibility of Miss Stangerson's not recognizing Larsan as her husband/assailant (or, alternatively, the plausibility that the victim and the chief detective would never have been in close enough proximity, over months, for her to have had an opportunity to recognize Larsan as her husband/assailant) and the likelihood that none of the world's police would realize that the master criminal Ballmeyer and the master detective Larsan were a single person, despite Ballmeyer's having been arrested and, presumably, photographed.