WHAT greater recommendation can be accorded The Mystery of the Yellow Room than the whole-hearted approval of Hercule Poirot? In his 1963 case, The Clocks, he discusses, in Chapter XIV, his forthcoming magnum opus on detective fiction:
‘And here is The Mystery of the Yellow Room. That—that really is a classic! I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach! … All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words … Everything should be clear at that supreme moment when the men meet at the angle of three corridors.’ He laid it down reverently. ‘Definitely a masterpiece …’
This, to some extent, reflects Agatha Christie’s own views, as expressed in An Autobiography. Discussing her reading influences in Part IV Chapter VII, she notes ‘… The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which had just come out, by a new author, Gaston Leroux, with an attractive young reporter as detective—his name was Rouletabille. It was a particularly baffling mystery, well worked out and planned …’ Writing of her early titles she notes that ‘The Murder on the Links was slightly less in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, and was influenced, I think, by The Mystery of the Yellow Room. It had rather that high-flown, fanciful type of writing.’ Apart from its French setting, it is difficult to see what influence Leroux’s novel had on Poirot’s investigation of the murder of Monsieur Renaud at the Villa Geneviève in Merlin-sur-Mer. But a more telling similarity can be found in an early draft of the final chapter of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in which Poirot, in a manner paralleling the Yellow Room’s detective, explains the deductions which led to his identification of the murderer of Emily Inglethorp. At the request of her publisher she changed the manner of Poirot’s exposition, not only because of its possible similarity to the Leroux novel but also—despite its undoubted dramatic impact—because of its legal feasibility.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room first appeared in the French newspaper L’Illustration between September and November 1907, and in book form the following year. It was the first novel of a writer already well-known in France for his international newspaper journalism in L’Echo de Paris and Le Matin.
Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in May 1868 and completed his schooling in Normandy. He returned to Paris to study Law, graduating in 1889. Becoming disillusioned with the judicial system, he turned his not inconsiderable abilities to journalism, first as a theatre critic and court reporter for L’Echo. Subsequent, more significant, journalism at Le Matin included coverage of the infamous Dreyfus affair, the 1905 Russian Revolution and the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius; other stints included time in Morocco and Turkey. A further career-change saw him turn to fiction and The Mystery of the Yellow Room was the first of almost forty novels before his death in Nice in 1927.
The novel’s detective, Joseph Rouletabille, is one of the youngest in the pantheon of Great Detectives. The novel’s narrator is the self-effacing Jean Sainclair, who tells how he first met Rouletabille when the journalist was sixteen-and-a-half and already involved in solving a high-profile murder case, ‘the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf’. His precocity impressed the editor of L’Epoque newspaper who offered him a post and, thereby, an entrée into the world of crime detection. At the time of The Mystery of the Yellow Room he is a mere eighteen! His real name is Joseph Josephine and his nickname—Rouletabille, because his head is as round as a bullet—was bestowed by his fellow-journalists and ‘his good humour enchanted the most severe tempered and disarmed the most zealous’ of them. We discover more about his antecedents—and the explanation of his rather peculiar real name—in the course of his second case, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1908). (There are quite a few references throughout The Mystery of the Yellow Room to this follow-up novel.)
The Mystery of the Yellow Room is set in 1892, principally in the Château du Glandier, the home of the chemist Professor Stangerson and his daughter, and assistant, Mathilde; they are working on his theory of ‘the dissociation of matter’ by electrical impulses that would contradict the law of ‘the conservation of matter’, a theory that might explain the ability of the novel’s villain to (seemingly) appear and disappear at will. The ‘yellow room’ of the title is Mademoiselle Mathilde’s bedroom, adjoining the laboratory, where she is attacked and injured by an assailant who immediately vanishes, despite the fact that the room is locked from the inside and no one saw the attacker enter or leave. At a later point an even more baffling disappearance takes place when Rouletabille and the investigating officer, Frédéric Larsan, have, as they fondly imagine, trapped the assailant in the Stangerson house. But he—or she?—manages to evade capture by vanishing almost in front of their astounded eyes, at ‘the angle of the three corridors’, referred to by Hercule Poirot, above.
The scene of each seeming miracle is illustrated by a detailed floor-plan to enable the reader to match wits with the investigators. In fact, there is an implied challenge to the reader in the text accompanying the first illustration: ‘With the lines of this plan and the description of its parts before them, my readers will know as much as Rouletabille when he entered the pavilion for the first time. With him they may now ask: How did the murderer escape from the Yellow Room?’ This foreshadows the ‘Challenge to the Reader’ ploy beloved of many Golden Age writers: Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Rupert Penny, Hugh Austin and Anthony Berkeley inter alia. And as if all this is not impressive enough Leroux manages a further surprise when the identity of the villain is revealed in the closing chapters.
Chapter VII explicitly references Edgar Allan Poe and his pioneering short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). And Rouletabille’s case shares elements with that first-ever detective story: the locked bedroom, the female victim, the brilliant detective and his enigmatic narrator friend, and the French setting.
Apart from the Queen of Crime, other detective novelists over the last century have extolled the importance of The Mystery of the Yellow Room as a landmark locked-room novel. John Dickson Carr, long-acknowledged Master of the Locked Room for his remarkable ingenuity in that difficult form, included it in his 1946 list of ‘Ten of the Best Detective Novels’. Carr’s detective, Dr Gideon Fell, discussing detective fiction in Chapter XVII of The Hollow Man (1935), simply calls the novel ‘the best detective tale ever written’. Ellery Queen and critic Howard Haycraft included it in their Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction list of 1941 and Julian Symons included it in his ‘Sunday Times Hundred Best Crime Stories’ (1957). And in 1981 Edward Hoch, the US master of the impossible crime short story, conducted an informal poll among locked room aficionados and The Mystery of the Yellow Room came in at Number 3 (three places ahead of an earlier title in this ‘Detective Story Club Classic’ reprint library, The Perfect Crime aka The Big Bow Mystery).
Among over two dozen novels, Leroux’s most famous work is undoubtedly The Phantom of the Opera (1910). The original novel enjoyed only moderate success until the release of a 1925 Hollywood silent film version starring Lon Chaney. The countless adaptations, in every medium, of this tale of love and revenge set in the Paris Opéra attest to its timeless appeal. Ironically, few, if any, could confidently name its author.
Leroux’s other, though far less-well known, contribution to crime fiction was his character Chéri-Bibi, who featured in a series of novels between 1913 and 1926; the exact bibliography is complicated by the fact that some of the original French novels generated two English translations. Chéri-Bibi, real name Jean Mascart, is wrongly convicted of the murder of a wealthy businessman, father of the girl he loves. The novels recount his various adventures as he repeatedly escapes from prison and tries to prove his innocence. There were numerous screen adaptations going back to 1915, including a 1931 Hollywood version, The Phantom of Paris. The earliest screen adaptation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room was a 1919 US silent movie and the most recent a Belgian/French version in 2003.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an important contribution to the development of the detective novel for a variety of reasons. First and foremost,