The official detective on the case is Frederick Larson, and Rouletabille pits his own wits against those of Larson, determined to get at the truth before him. Darzac and Professor Stangerson invite Rouletabille to stay at the chateau, where he is given a room next to the official detective on the case, while Mathilde lays a few rooms away recovering from her attack. He quickly befriends Robert Darzac – the fiancé of Mathilde – who has already fallen under suspicion of the crime. “It was at that stage of our friendship that the famous case of the Yellow Room occurred – a case which was not only to place him in the first rank of newspaper reporters, but also to prove him to be the greatest detective in the world – a double role which it was not that surprising to find played by the same person, considering that the daily press was already fast becoming what is today – the gazette of crime.”Įnter Joseph Rouletabille, a young journalist and amateur detective, who with his friend lawyer Sainclair (who is our narrator) travels to the chateau to investigate. When they eventually break down the door, they find Mathilde badly injured from a blow to the head, a bloody handprint on the wall, and no sign whatsoever of the attacker. Soon after her father and their trusty servant Old Jacques hear sounds of disturbance and cries of “Murder murder!” coming from the locked room. One night – having been working with her father until midnight Mathilde retires to bed in this small square room, locking and bolting the door behind her. During the summer months Mathilde Stangerson sleeps in a small bedroom behind the laboratory – the yellow room. The setting for this early nineteenth century mystery is an isolated French chateau – where in a small pavilion in the grounds a scientific professor and his attractive thirty-five year old daughter spends hours closeted together over ground breaking scientific study. Gaston Leroux was not the first person to write a locked room mystery – that I think was probably Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840’s, but some consider The Mystery of the Yellow Room to among the best of its kind. I am now a fan, and want to read all his books that are available in English.
When I was researching which authors were born in May, for my birthday reading challenge I saw Gaston Leroux‘s name pop up on several lists – and for a while didn’t register I had one of his books on my TBR. It was only very recently that I realised it was by the author of Phantom of the Opera (the novel) which I’m now not even sure I knew was a novel. I picked up The Mystery of the Yellow Room in a charity shop sometimes ago and thought it looked interesting. Sometimes I feel stupidly ignorant of things I really should know, and here I am admitting to it.
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