The Mystery of the Yellow Room
One of the defining novels of the entire crime genre, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room has inspired readers and writers including Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and is now republished in hardback in the Detective Club series with a brand new introduction.Breaking down her door in response to the sounds of a violent attack and a gunshot, Mademoiselle Stangerson’s rescuers are appalled to find her dying on the floor, clubbed down by a large mutton bone. But in a room with a barred window and locked door, how could her assailant have entered and escaped undetected? While bewildered police officials from the Sûreté begin an exhaustive investigation, so too does a young newspaperman, Joseph Rouletabille, who will encounter more impossibilities before this case can be closed.The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, best remembered today as the author of The Phantom of the Opera, has been deservedly praised for more than a century as a defining book in the ‘impossible crime’ genre, as readable now as when it first appeared in French in 1907.This Detective Club classic includes an introduction by John Curran, who discusses how the book impressed and influenced a young Agatha Christie, was lauded by genre giants including John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Julian Symons, and remains to this day one of the most effective and enjoyable locked room mysteries ever written.
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‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Edward Arnold 1909
Originally published in French as Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune 1907
Introduction © John Curran 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008167035
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008167042
Version: 2018-03-14
Contents
I. IN WHICH WE BEGIN NOT TO UNDERSTAND
II. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE APPEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME
III. ‘A MAN HAS PASSED LIKE A SHADOW THROUGH THE BLINDS’
IV. ‘IN THE BOSOM OF WILD NATURE’
VI. IN THE HEART OF THE OAK GROVE
VII. IN WHICH ROULETABILLE SETS OUT ON AN EXPEDITION UNDER THE BED
VIII. THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE QUESTIONS MADEMOISELLE STANGERSON
X. ‘WE SHALL HAVE TO EAT RED MEAT—NOW’
XI. IN WHICH FRÉDÉRIC LARSAN EXPLAINS HOW THE MURDERER WAS ABLE TO GET OUT OF THE YELLOW ROOM
XIII. ‘THE PRESBYTERY HAS LOST NOTHING OF ITS CHARM, NOR THE GARDEN ITS BRIGHTNESS’
XIV. ‘I EXPECT THE ASSASSIN THIS EVENING’
XVI. STRANGE PHENOMENON OF THE DISSOCIATION OF MATTER
XVII. THE INEXPLICABLE GALLERY
XVIII. ROULETABILLE HAS DRAWN A CIRCLE BETWEEN THE TWO BUMPS ON HIS FOREHEAD
XIX. ROULETABILLE INVITES ME TO BREAKFAST AT THE DONJON INN
XX. AN ACT OF MADEMOISELLE STANGERSON
XXIV. ROULETABILLE KNOWS THE TWO HALVES OF THE MURDERER
XXV. ROULETABILLE GOES ON A JOURNEY
XXVI. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE IS AWAITED WITH IMPATIENCE
XXVII. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE APPEARS IN ALL HIS GLORY
XXVIII. IN WHICH IT IS PROVED THAT ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS THINK OF EVERYTHING
WHAT greater recommendation can be accorded The Mystery of the Yellow Room than the whole-hearted approval of Hercule Poirot? In his 1963 case, TheClocks, he discusses, in Chapter XIV, his forthcoming magnumopus 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 AnAutobiography. 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
