The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room: Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille, Reporter by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. It was first published in France in the periodical L’Illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then in its own right in 1908. It is the first novel starring fictional detective 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.