The Mystery of the Yellow Room (in French Le mystère de la chambre jaune) is a mystery novel written by French author Gaston Leroux. One of the first locked-room mystery novels, it was first published serially 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 reporter 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 crime scene. 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.
The novel finds its continuation in The Perfume of the Lady in Black, wherein a number of the characters familiar from this story reappear.
Video The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Plot summary
Reporter and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. Mathilde Stangerson, the 30-something daughter of the castle's owner, Professor Joseph Stangerson, was found near-critically battered in a room adjacent to his laboratory on the castle grounds, with the door still locked from the inside. She recovers slowly but can make no useful testimony. Rouletabille meets and interrogates several characters: the castle's concierges Mr & Mrs Bernier, the old servant Jacques, an unfriendly inn landlord and a womanising gamekeeper, and begins a friendly rivalry with France's top police detective Frédéric Larsan, who has been assigned the case. Larsan suspects Ms Stangerson's fiancé, another scientist called Robert Darzac, to Rouletabille's dismay.
More attempts are made on Ms Stangerson's life despite Rouletabille and Larsan's protection, and the perpetrator appears to vanish on two occasions when they are closing in on him, echoing Professor's Stangerson's research into "matter dissociation". The game-keeper is murdered during the second attempt. Ultimately, Larsan arrests Darzac who is charged with murder attempts. Rouletabille suspects that Darzac has secret reasons not to defend himself and he disappears to make further investigations.
Two-and-a-half months later, as Darzac's trial opens, Rouletabille reappears sensationally and tells the court that the culprit is Frédéric Larsan himself, whom he accuses of being an alter-ego of a master criminal called Ballmeyer. Larsan appeared to vanish on the two occasions he was nearly collared as he was one of the pursuers. Darzac is released when it emerges that Larsan has vanished after Rouletabille warned him he would accuse him in court. The mystery of the locked Yellow Room is explained thus: Larsan assaulted Ms Stangerson earlier in the day than originally thought, but she hid the traces of the attack and locked herself away. During the night, traumatised by the event, she fell off her bed and inflicted the gravest of the wounds by hitting her temple on the corner of her bed-side table.
The background to these events is kept secret in court but finally explained by Sainclair. Ballmeyer, in a different guise, had seduced Ms Stangerson in her youth and married her secretly in the United States. They had a child before he was arrested and his identity revealed to her. Ms Stangerson had arranged for her son's care and education and hidden the whole saga from her father; her silence and Robert Darzac's behaviour were motivated by her desperation to keep him from finding out. Ballmeyer however, hearing that she was engaged, had decided to reappear in her life and claim her as his wife once more, by force if necessary.
Maps The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Characters
- Joseph Rouletabille - the young journalist and amateur detective, protagonist
- Jean Sainclair - Rouletabille's friend and lawyer, the narrator
- Frédéric Larsan - the police detective
- Professor Stangerson - the scientist, owner of "Chateau du Glandier"
- Mlle. Mathilde Stangerson - daughter of a famous scientist, the victim
- "Daddy" Jacques - an old servant in the Stangerson family
Reception
John Dickson Carr, the master of locked-room mystery, has his detective Dr. Gideon Fell declare this the "best detective tale ever written", in his novel The Hollow Man (1935).
Agatha Christie admired the novel and in her early years said she would like to try writing such a book.
In a poll of 17 mystery writers and reviewers, this novel was voted the third-best locked-room mystery of all time, behind The Hollow Man (1935) and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944).
Adaptations
Film and TV:
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1919)
- Mystère de la chambre jaune, Le (1930) on IMDb
- El misterio del cuarto amarillo (1947) on IMDb
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1949)
- Mystère de la chambre jaune, Le (1965) on IMDb
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room (2003)
- An episode of Jonathan Creek features a stage adaptation of the novel and centres around a similar event happening to one of its actors.
Radio:
- Gaston Leroux -- The Mystery of the Yellow Room, BBC Radio 4, 1998, starring Nicholas Boulton and Geoffrey Whitehead
Release details
- 1907, France, L'illustration, Pub date ? September 1907--? November 1907, magazine serial (in French)
- 1908, France, Editions Jacques Lafitte (ISBN NA), Pub date ? ? 1908, hardback (First edition) (in French)
- 1934, UK, Oxford University Press (ISBN 0-19-832345-X), Pub date ? December 1934, paperback (in French)
- 1977, UK, Dover Publications (ISBN 0-486-23460-6), Pub date ? April 1977, paperback
- 1978, UK, Remploy (ISBN 0-7066-0759-7), Pub date 25 August 1978, hardback
- 1996, US, Books on Tape (ISBN 5-557-12771-2), Pub date ? January 1996, audio book (Cassette)
- 1996, US, Buccaneer Books (ISBN 0-89966-141-6), Pub date ? June 1996, hardback (Library binding)
- 1997, UK, Dedalus Ltd (ISBN 1-873982-38-0), Pub date 10 August 1997, paperback
- 2002, US, Indypublish.com (ISBN 1-4043-2003-2), Pub date 1 August 2002, paperback
- 2002, US, Indypublish.com (ISBN 1-4043-2002-4), Pub date 1 August 2002, hardback
- 2004, UK, Thorndike Press (ISBN 0-7862-6991-X), Pub date 2 Nov 2004, hardback
- 2005, US, Kessinger Publishing (ISBN 0-7661-9366-7), Pub date 1 April 2005, paperback
- 2006, UK, Blackstone Audiobooks (ISBN 0-7861-7523-0), Pub date ? April 2006, audio book (MP3 CD)
- 2006, UK, Dover Publications (ISBN 0-486-44928-9), Pub date 7 April 2006, paperback
- 2009, US, Black Coat Press (ISBN 1-934543-60-8), Pub date October 2009, trade paperback
See also
- Whodunit
References
External links
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room on IMDb
- Mystery of the Yellow Room at Project Gutenberg
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- (in French) L'univers de Joseph Rouletabille, rouletabille.perso.cegetel.net
- (in French) The Mystery of the Yellow Room, audio version, litteratureaudio.com
Source of article : Wikipedia
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