Best known as the writer who originally created the haunting figure of the Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux also published a sequence of mystery novels featuring the teenage amateur detective Rouletabille. The first of these, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, remains one of the greatest of all 'locked room' mysteries. Professor Stangerson is a Franco-American scientist of great renown who has retired to an isolated chateau outside Paris to work on his potentially world-changing experiments. Living with him is his daughter, about to be married after a long courtship to another scientist. One night, as the professor is working late, his daughter retires to her room, the yellow room of the title. Suddenly, awful cries of 'Murder - murder - help' are heard coming from the room. When the professor and his servants break into it, they find Mlle Stangerson lying on the floor, terribly injured and unable to speak. The door to the room was locked from the inside; so too were the metal blinds on its only window. The assailant seems to have disappeared into thin air and there is talk among the servants that the Devil has been at work in the chateau. It is up to the crime reporter Rouletabille to throw light on the mystery of what has happened to Mlle Stangerson. Like a much younger, smarter, French brother of Sherlock Holmes, Rouletabille spots clues that everyone else has missed, makes deductive leaps no one else is imaginative enough to contemplate and throws out cryptic remarks to his Dr Watson, the lawyer Sainclair, which go to the heart of the puzzle.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room, like the Holmes' stories, is a product of its era but it is much more than just a period piece. Leroux manipulates his plot with great skill, from the first exposition of the mystery to the dramatic denouement, and, in the precocious Rouletabille, a master detective who has scarcely started shaving, he creates a memorable central character.

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