The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

By Gaston Leroux

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. More attempts are made on Ms Stangerson's life despite Rouletabille and police detective 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".

This is supposedly the original "locked room" mystery, and I was intrigued by the premise, but man, it was a bit of a tough go.  First of all, Leroux is the same guy who wrote The Phantom of the Opera, and this was written in a similarly overwrought style.  I've read older books before, and even ones that were a bit more flowery in their style still managed to engage, but this one just made me want to skim everything.  Second, I kept thinking it would be a short, fast read, but every chapter was agonizing.  Third, the solution to the mystery was kind of silly.  Let's get into nitpicks!

Sooooo, the lady was attacked earlier that day, but (for various reasons) did not want to tell anyone, and managed to go about her business for a couple of hours until bedtime, when she suddenly has a nightmare, trips and falls out of bed, hitting her head on her nightstand, and then becomes insensate and hospitalized? Why didn't she just tell people it was a nightmare? I mean, sure, the bloody handprint, but she could have just said she had no idea how that got there.  

Then we find out that the master detective is actually the attacker and a huge fraud, so, his plan after his wife leaves him and he escapes jail is to... go to France and pretend to be a detective for at least five years, and then wait around for his wife to decide to marry someone else, at which point... he attacks her and then gets himself assigned to the case so he can frame her new lover for the crime? Great long term thinking there!  I did correctly guess the attacker was a previous (and jealous) lover of the lady, but apparently this guy has just been hanging around town for years, literally solving crimes, and he couldn't be bothered to track her down? And if he wasn't hanging around for years solving crimes, how on earth did he join the detective force in time to "investigate" this one?? For that matter, why on earth was he pretending to be a detective in the first place? So he can make a steady living, while also framing people for crimes they didn't commit? Seems kind of petty for a master criminal. 

And meanwhile her new lover is arrested because he's being conned away by an associate of the husband, each time she's attacked - you'd think after the first time he'd wise up and stop letting that happen.  Instead, she's attacked like, three times!  And each time, this guy has no alibi! 

Maybe I'm just bitter that I didn't figure out that Larsan was the criminal.  In my defense, (a) I think it's ridiculous that a master criminal worked his way up through the Paris detective ranks and just did that for years and (b) my copy of the book was on an e-reader, so the "detailed plans" of the various crime scene layouts was just a jumble of lines and labels, and (b, part 2) Rouletabille is so obtuse in his manner of talking that I couldn't figure out what the eff was going on. You could have set that scene to "Yakety Sax" for all I knew.  

There's also a lot of misdirection about the landskeeper, and every other servant is called "Daddy" something (not a joke) so I wasn't even entirely sure who was who, but we'll call that sour grapes and  chalk it up to my not caring enough to read carefully or attentively.  Good for the completist, but otherwise I prefer my other mysteries.