John Curran - The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room is set in 1892, principally in the Château du Glandier, the home of the chemist Professor Stangerson and his daughter, and assistant, Mathilde; they are working on his theory of ‘the dissociation of matter’ by electrical impulses that would contradict the law of ‘the conservation of matter’, a theory that might explain the ability of the novel’s villain to (seemingly) appear and disappear at will. The ‘yellow room’ of the title is Mademoiselle Mathilde’s bedroom, adjoining the laboratory, where she is attacked and injured by an assailant who immediately vanishes, despite the fact that the room is locked from the inside and no one saw the attacker enter or leave. At a later point an even more baffling disappearance takes place when Rouletabille and the investigating officer, Frédéric Larsan, have, as they fondly imagine, trapped the assailant in the Stangerson house. But he—or she?—manages to evade capture by vanishing almost in front of their astounded eyes, at ‘the angle of the three corridors’, referred to by Hercule Poirot, above.

The scene of each seeming miracle is illustrated by a detailed floor-plan to enable the reader to match wits with the investigators. In fact, there is an implied challenge to the reader in the text accompanying the first illustration: ‘With the lines of this plan and the description of its parts before them, my readers will know as much as Rouletabille when he entered the pavilion for the first time. With him they may now ask: How did the murderer escape from the Yellow Room?’ This foreshadows the ‘Challenge to the Reader’ ploy beloved of many Golden Age writers: Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Rupert Penny, Hugh Austin and Anthony Berkeley inter alia . And as if all this is not impressive enough Leroux manages a further surprise when the identity of the villain is revealed in the closing chapters.

Chapter VII explicitly references Edgar Allan Poe and his pioneering short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). And Rouletabille’s case shares elements with that first-ever detective story: the locked bedroom, the female victim, the brilliant detective and his enigmatic narrator friend, and the French setting.

Apart from the Queen of Crime, other detective novelists over the last century have extolled the importance of The Mystery of the Yellow Room as a landmark locked-room novel. John Dickson Carr, long-acknowledged Master of the Locked Room for his remarkable ingenuity in that difficult form, included it in his 1946 list of ‘Ten of the Best Detective Novels’. Carr’s detective, Dr Gideon Fell, discussing detective fiction in Chapter XVII of The Hollow Man (1935), simply calls the novel ‘the best detective tale ever written’. Ellery Queen and critic Howard Haycraft included it in their Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction list of 1941 and Julian Symons included it in his ‘ Sunday Times Hundred Best Crime Stories’ (1957). And in 1981 Edward Hoch, the US master of the impossible crime short story, conducted an informal poll among locked room aficionados and The Mystery of the Yellow Room came in at Number 3 (three places ahead of an earlier title in this ‘Detective Story Club Classic’ reprint library, The Perfect Crime aka The Big Bow Mystery ).

Among over two dozen novels, Leroux’s most famous work is undoubtedly The Phantom of the Opera (1910). The original novel enjoyed only moderate success until the release of a 1925 Hollywood silent film version starring Lon Chaney. The countless adaptations, in every medium, of this tale of love and revenge set in the Paris Opéra attest to its timeless appeal. Ironically, few, if any, could confidently name its author.

Leroux’s other, though far less-well known, contribution to crime fiction was his character Chéri-Bibi, who featured in a series of novels between 1913 and 1926; the exact bibliography is complicated by the fact that some of the original French novels generated two English translations. Chéri-Bibi, real name Jean Mascart, is wrongly convicted of the murder of a wealthy businessman, father of the girl he loves. The novels recount his various adventures as he repeatedly escapes from prison and tries to prove his innocence. There were numerous screen adaptations going back to 1915, including a 1931 Hollywood version, The Phantom of Paris . The earliest screen adaptation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room was a 1919 US silent movie and the most recent a Belgian/French version in 2003.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an important contribution to the development of the detective novel for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it is cleverly plotted and tantalisingly presented, in the manner of the best novels of the approaching Golden Age. The inclusion of detailed maps of the area and floor-plans of the crime scenes, with accompanying hints and challenges to the reader, anticipates later, more sophisticated similar gambits. His Great—though very young—Detective was distinctly original, although it could be argued that his extreme youth militates against credibility. And like all the best detectives, Rouletabille is given to enigmatic utterances, viz. his questions about the victim’s hair in Chapter VI and his observations about a coloured handkerchief in Chapter VII. Leroux’s creation of atmosphere—in, for example, the trap-setting scene in the Stangerson household—is impressive; who does not feel a frisson as the narrator waits in his dark closet, peering out at a moonlit corridor, waiting for … what? And the novel remains, despite its age, as readable as ever.

DR JOHN CURRAN

January 2018

IT is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole truth of the prodigious case known as that of the Yellow Room, out of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, apropos of a recent nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grand cross of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal—in an article, miserable for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy—had not resuscitated a terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished to be for ever forgotten.

The Yellow Room! Who now remembers this affair which caused so much ink to flow fifteen years ago? Events are so quickly forgotten in Paris. Has not the very name of the Nayves trial and the tragic history of the death of little Menaldo passed out of mind? And yet the public attention was so deeply interested in the details of the trial that the occurrence of a ministerial crisis was completely unnoticed at the time. Now the Yellow Room trial, which, preceded that of the Nayves by some years, made far more noise. The entire world hung for months over this obscure problem—the most obscure, it seems to me, that has ever challenged the perspicacity of our police or taxed the conscience of our judges. The solution of the problem baffled everybody who tried to find it. It was like a dramatic rebus with which old Europe and new America alike became fascinated. That is, in truth—I am permitted to say, because there cannot be any author’s vanity in all this, since I do nothing more than transcribe facts on which an exceptional documentation enables me to throw a new light—that is because, in truth, I do not know that, in the domain of reality or imagination, one can discover or recall to mind anything comparable, in its mystery, with the natural mystery of the Yellow Room.