The Secret of the Night
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In The Mystery of the Yellow Room, the ingenious fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille tackles one of the most baffling puzzles in crime fiction—a seemingly impossible locked-room crime, where the culprit vanishes without a trace.
This story is often credited as the birth of the locked-room mystery subgenre, a claim some debate with a knowing sigh—after all, many inventions in literature and science are frequently traced back to monks, ancient civilizations, or long-forgotten scholars.
The master of locked-room mysteries himself, John Dickson Carr, hailed The Mystery of the Yellow Room as the finest locked-room tale ever written in his 1935 classic The Hollow Man.
Gaston Leroux’s legacy in French detective fiction stands alongside the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Britain and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States, marking him as one of the great pioneers of the genre.