This year marks the 110th anniversary of a landmark book: The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux, who is better known as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. It was first published as a serial in a French magazine in 1907. We often speak about a particular book as, in some way, "defining" some mystery sub-genre, but The Mystery of the Yellow Room seems to deserve its honors. If not the very first, it was certainly among the first "impossible crime" mystery novels. We are told that both John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie admired the book. It has been a while since I last read it, but here is the (slightly edited) review I wrote for the Classic Mysteries podcast nearly a decade ago.
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In John Dickson Carr’s marvelous book, The Three Coffins – or The Hollow Man, as it was called in England – his detective, Gideon Fell, in discussing locked rooms and impossible crimes, calls The Mystery of the Yellow Room "the best detective tale ever written." I’m not sure I would agree with that – personally, I think The Three Coffins itself may deserve that honor – but there’s no question that Gaston Leroux’s book remains one of the most effective stories of the locked room genre.
In The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a young woman is attacked inside a locked room. The door is locked on the inside, and it is under constant observation; the only window is barred and impassible. The victim's screams and cries are heard. But when the door is broken down and the room entered, the victim – unconscious, but not dead – is alone in the room. Her assailant apparently has left a hat behind, along with a large mutton bone, the apparent weapon. And a gun has been fired and, it would appear, the assailant must have been injured. But there is nobody in the room except the victim.
While various investigators and police officials conduct their investigations – and appear either baffled or bent on following false trails – it is a young newspaperman, Joseph Rouletabille, who will ultimately solve the mystery. Along the way, there will be a murder – and more than one other impossible situation will have to be explained.
It is certainly worth noting that The Mystery of the Yellow Room was originally published as a serial in a French magazine in 1907 before it was published as a book the next year. It appeared in an English translation one year later. So it is over a century old. Yet I would have to say that the ultimate explanations of the mysteries in the case have held up remarkably well over the years. There are no false doors, no sliding panels, and no secret passages. Nor is there any supernatural explanation. At one point, for example, the criminal apparently disappears from a guarded passage unseen by any of the watchers converging upon him. But while police scratch their heads trying to determine what happened, Leroux’s newspaperman detective sees through to the solution.
For the most part, we observe the events at the same time that Rouletabille does – and, often, we see events through his eyes or at least through the notes he has made about what has happened. We are given clues which should point us in the right direction – that is, if we are able to get past the misdirection employed by the author.
I will admit I was surprised by the eventual unmasking of the criminal. And while I may complain that some of the events described here are unlikely, that same complaint could be applied with justice to almost all the stories of the impossible crime genre.
I do have one complaint with the edition which I read: the Dover book uses the anonymous translation from the French which was made back in 1908 for the original English edition published by Brentano’s. To my eye and ear, the English sounds very stilted and somewhat unnatural – as if someone attempted a too-literal translation of the French text. The result, for me at least, is some English which, at times, becomes completely incomprehensible. Thus the disappearance of the criminal from a hallway, which I mentioned earlier, is called “the inexplicable gallery.” And it leads to paragraphs such as this one:
“Be of good courage, then, friend Rouletabille; it is impossible that the incident of the inexplicable gallery should be outside the circle of your reason. You know that! Then have faith and take thought with yourself and forget not that you took hold of the right end when you drew that circle in your brain within which to unravel this mysterious play of circumstance.
No, I haven’t the faintest idea what that is supposed to be saying.
But this is carping on my part, and probably picking unfairly at a century-old translation of what is still a very fine mystery. I do think it’s necessary for the modern reader to gloss over some of the language in order to enjoy and appreciate the mystery here.
Gaston Leroux is probably best remembered today, at least in the English-speaking world, as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. But he wrote a great many other books, including several mysteries. The Mystery of the Yellow Room deserves the praise it has attracted over the past hundred years. It remains what it has always been: a well-written, carefully plotted mystery and love story, with some truly fine examples of locked rooms and other impossible crimes, logically and satisfyingly solved. After a century, it remains in print, and it’s quite easily obtained.
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To listen to the original podcast review, please click here.
Next week: The Penguin Pool Murder, by Stuart Palmer.
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