The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. 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 scene of the crime.

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. John Dickson Carr, the master of locked-room mystery, has his detective Dr Gideon Fell declare this as the 'best detective tale ever written' in his 1935 novel The Hollow Man.