tion>
Gaston Leroux
MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM
The first detective Joseph Rouletabille novel and one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels
Published by
Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting
[email protected] 2017 OK Publishing ISBN 978-80-272-3302-1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. In Which We Begin Not to Understand
Chapter 2. In Which Joseph Roultabille Appears for the First Time
Chapter 3. “A Man Has Passed Like a Shadow Through the Blinds”
Chapter 4. “In the Bosom of Wild Nature”
Chapter 6. In the Heart of the Oak Grove
Chapter 7. In Which Rouletabille Sets Out on an Expedition Under the Bed
Chapter 8. The Examining Magistrate Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson
Chapter 9. Reporter and Detective
Chapter 10. “We Shall Have to Eat Red Meat—Now”
Chapter 12. Frederic Larsan’s Cane
Chapter 13. “The Presbytery Has Lost Nothing of Its Charm, Nor the Garden Its Brightness”
Chapter 14. “I Expect the Assassin This Evening”
Chapter 16. Strange Phenomenon of the Dissociation of Matter
Chapter 17. The Inexplicable Gallery
Chapter 18. Rouletabille Has Drawn a Circle Between the Two Bumps on His Forehead
Chapter 19. Rouletabille Invites Me to Breakfast at the Donjon Inn
Chapter 20. An Act of Mademoiselle Stangerson
Chapter 22. The Incredible Body
Chapter 24. Rouletabille Knows the Two Halves of the Murderer
Chapter 25. Rouletabille Goes on a Journey
Chapter 26. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Is Awaited with Impatience
Chapter 27. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Appears in All His Glory
Chapter 28. In Which It Is Proved That One Does Not Always Think of Everything
Chapter 29. The Mystery of Mademoiselle Stangerson
Chapter 1. In Which We Begin Not to Understand
It is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole truth of the prodigious case known as that of The Yellow Room, out of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, propos of a recent nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grandcross of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal—in an article, miserable for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy—had not resuscitated a terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished to be for ever forgotten.
The Yellow Room! Who now remembers this affair which caused so much ink to flow fifteen years ago? Events are so quickly forgotten in Paris. Has not the very name of the Nayves trial and the tragic history of the death of little Menaldo passed out of mind? And yet the public attention was so deeply interested in the details of the trial that the occurrence of a ministerial crisis was completely unnoticed at the time. Now The Yellow Room trial, which, preceded that of the Nayves by some years, made far more noise. The entire world hung for months over this obscure problem—the most obscure, it seems to me, that has ever challenged the perspicacity of our police or taxed the conscience of our judges. The solution of the problem baffled everybody who tried to find it. It was like a dramatic rebus with which old Europe and new America alike became fascinated. That is, in truth—I am permitted to say, because there cannot be any author’s vanity in all this, since I do nothing more than transcribe facts on which an exceptional documentation enables me to throw a new light—that is because, in truth, I do not know that, in the domain of reality or imagination, one can discover or recall to mind anything comparable, in its mystery, with the natural mystery of The Yellow Room.
That which nobody could find out, Joseph Rouletabille, aged eighteen, then a reporter engaged on a leading journal, succeeded in discovering. But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man. The reasons which he had for his reticence