The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Reporter and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. Mathilde Stangerson, the 30-something daughter of the castle's owner, Professor Joseph Stangerson, was found near-critically battered in a room adjacent to his laboratory on the castle grounds, with the door still locked from the inside. She recovers slowly but can make no useful testimony. Rouletabille meets and interrogates several characters: the castle's concierges Mr & Mrs Bernier, the old servant Jacques, an unfriendly inn landlord and a womanising gamekeeper, and begins a friendly rivalry with France's top police detective Frédéric Larsan, who has been assigned the case. Larsan suspects Ms Stangerson's fiancé, another scientist called Robert Darzac, to Rouletabille's dismay.

More attempts are made on Ms Stangerson's life despite Rouletabille and Larsan's protection, and the perpetrator appears to vanish on two occasions when they are closing in on him, echoing Professor Stangerson's research into "matter dissociation". The game-keeper is murdered during the second attempt. Ultimately, Larsan arrests Darzac who is charged with murder attempts. Rouletabille suspects that Darzac has secret reasons not to defend himself and he disappears to make further investigations.

Two-and-a-half months later, as Darzac's trial opens, Rouletabille reappears sensationally and tells the court that the culprit is Frédéric Larsan himself, whom he accuses of being an alter-ego of a master criminal called Ballmeyer. Larsan appeared to vanish on the two occasions he was nearly collared as he was one of the pursuers. Darzac is released when it emerges that Larsan has vanished after Rouletabille warned him he would accuse him in court. The mystery of the locked Yellow Room is explained thus: Larsan assaulted Ms Stangerson earlier in the day than originally thought, but she hid the traces of the attack and locked herself away. During the night, traumatised by the event, she fell off her bed and inflicted the gravest of the wounds by hitting her temple on the corner of her bed-side table.

The background to these events is kept secret in court but finally explained by Sainclair. Ballmeyer, in a different guise, had seduced Ms Stangerson in her youth and married her secretly in the United States. They had a child before he was arrested and his identity revealed to her. Ms Stangerson had arranged for her son's care and education and hidden the whole saga from her father; her silence and Robert Darzac's behaviour were motivated by her desperation to keep him from finding out. Ballmeyer however, hearing that she was engaged, had decided to reappear in her life and claim her as his wife once more, by force if necessary.

• Joseph Rouletabille – the young journalist and amateur detective, protagonist
• Jean Sainclair – Rouletabille's friend and lawyer, the narrator
• Frédéric Larsan – the police detective
• Professor Stangerson – the scientist, owner of "Chateau du Glandier"
• Mlle. Mathilde Stangerson – daughter of a famous scientist, the victim
• "Father" Jacques – an old servant in the Stangerson family

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

Agatha Christie admired the novel and in her early years said she would like to try writing such a book.

In a 1981 poll by Edward D. Hoch of 17 mystery writers and reviewers, this novel was voted the third-best locked-room mystery of all time, behind Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) and John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (1935).[1]

The popular 1946 Japanese detective novel The Honjin Murders (本陣殺人事件, Honjin satsujin jiken) by Seishi Yokomizo refers to The Mystery of the Yellow Room numerous times, the narrator quipping that Leroux's novel "bears the closest resemblance" to the story recounted in the novel.

Film and TV:

• The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1919)
• The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1930)
• El misterio del cuarto amarillo (1947) at IMDb
• The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1949)
• Mystère de la chambre jaune, Le (1965) at IMDb
• The Mystery of the Yellow Room (2003)
• An episode of Jonathan Creek features a stage adaptation of the novel and centres around a similar event happening to one of its actors.

Radio:

• Gaston Leroux – The Mystery of the Yellow Room, BBC Radio 4, 1998, starring Nicholas Boulton and Geoffrey Whitehead[2]

• 1907, France, L'illustration, Pub September–November 1907, magazine serial (in French)
• 1908, France, Editions Jacques Lafitte (ISBN NA), (First edition) (in French)
• 1934, UK, Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-832345-X, (in French)
• 1977, UK, Dover Publications ISBN 0-486-23460-6
• 1978, UK, Remploy ISBN 0-7066-0759-7
• 1996, US, Books on Tape ISBN 5-557-12771-2
• 1996, US, Buccaneer Books ISBN 0-89966-141-6
• 1997, UK, Dedalus Ltd ISBN 1-873982-38-0
• 2002, US, Indypublish.com ISBN 1-4043-2003-2
• 2002, US, Indypublish.com ISBN 1-4043-2002-4
• 2004, UK, Thorndike Press ISBN 0-7862-6991-X
• 2005, US, Kessinger Publishing ISBN 0-7661-9366-7
• 2006, UK, Blackstone Audiobooks ISBN 0-7861-7523-0, audio book (MP3 CD)
• 2006, UK, Dover Publications ISBN 0-486-44928-9
• 2009, US, Black Coat Press ISBN 1-934543-60-8

• Whodunit

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

• The Mystery of the Yellow Room at IMDb
• Mystery of the Yellow Room at Project Gutenberg
• The Mystery of the Yellow Room public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• (in French) L'univers de Joseph Rouletabille, rouletabille.perso.cegetel.net
• (in French) The Mystery of the Yellow Room, audio version, litteratureaudio.com