The Mystery of the Yellow Room

About the book

Mathilde Stangerson is attacked in a room whose apparent security makes the assailant's escape impossible to explain. The young reporter Joseph Rouletabille investigates with an assurance that unsettles more established authorities, while his companion recounts the inquiry through observations, conversations, and competing interpretations. Leroux gives physical arrangements unusual importance: doors, windows, passages, and the positions of witnesses become materials in an argument about what could have happened. Yet the puzzle cannot be understood solely as a diagram, because the people involved have reasons to withhold parts of their history. The novel sustains its mystery by allowing an apparently persuasive explanation to produce new difficulties. Readers are invited to distinguish an accumulation of details from the organizing insight that would make those details belong to the same event.

• Evidence and inference
• Secrecy
• Intellectual rivalry

Why read it

For an elaborate locked-room puzzle that makes rival explanations part of the suspense rather than a pause within it.

English translation