John Curran: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

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COLLINS CRIME CLUB

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First published in Great Britain by Edward Arnold 1909

Originally published in French as Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune 1907

Introduction © John Curran 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008167035

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008167042

Version: 2018-03-14

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

I. IN WHICH WE BEGIN NOT TO UNDERSTAND

II. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE APPEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME

III. ‘A MAN HAS PASSED LIKE A SHADOW THROUGH THE BLINDS’

IV. ‘IN THE BOSOM OF WILD NATURE’

V. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE MAKES A REMARK TO MONSIEUR ROBERT DARZAC WHICH PRODUCES ITS LITTLE EFFECT

VI. IN THE HEART OF THE OAK GROVE

VII. IN WHICH ROULETABILLE SETS OUT ON AN EXPEDITION UNDER THE BED

VIII. THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE QUESTIONS MADEMOISELLE STANGERSON

IX. REPORTER AND DETECTIVE

X. ‘WE SHALL HAVE TO EAT RED MEAT—NOW’

XI. IN WHICH FRÉDÉRIC LARSAN EXPLAINS HOW THE MURDERER WAS ABLE TO GET OUT OF THE YELLOW ROOM

XII. FRÉDÉRIC LARSAN’S CANE

XIII. ‘THE PRESBYTERY HAS LOST NOTHING OF ITS CHARM, NOR THE GARDEN ITS BRIGHTNESS’

XIV. ‘I EXPECT THE ASSASSIN THIS EVENING’

XV. THE TRAP

XVI. STRANGE PHENOMENON OF THE DISSOCIATION OF MATTER

XVII. THE INEXPLICABLE GALLERY

XVIII. ROULETABILLE HAS DRAWN A CIRCLE BETWEEN THE TWO BUMPS ON HIS FOREHEAD

XIX. ROULETABILLE INVITES ME TO BREAKFAST AT THE DONJON INN

XX. AN ACT OF MADEMOISELLE STANGERSON

XXI. ON THE WATCH

XXII. THE INCREDIBLE BODY

XXIII. THE DOUBLE SCENT

XXIV. ROULETABILLE KNOWS THE TWO HALVES OF THE MURDERER

XXV. ROULETABILLE GOES ON A JOURNEY

XXVI. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE IS AWAITED WITH IMPATIENCE

XXVII. IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE APPEARS IN ALL HIS GLORY

XXVIII. IN WHICH IT IS PROVED THAT ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS THINK OF EVERYTHING

XXIX. THE MYSTERY OF MADEMOISELLE STANGERSON

Footnote

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The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

WHAT greater recommendation can be accorded The Mystery of the Yellow Room than the whole-hearted approval of Hercule Poirot? In his 1963 case, TheClocks , he discusses, in Chapter XIV, his forthcoming magnumopus on detective fiction:

‘And here is The Mystery of the Yellow Room . That—that really is a classic! I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach! … All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words … Everything should be clear at that supreme moment when the men meet at the angle of three corridors.’ He laid it down reverently. ‘Definitely a masterpiece …’

This, to some extent, reflects Agatha Christie’s own views, as expressed in AnAutobiography. Discussing her reading influences in Part IV Chapter VII, she notes ‘… The Mystery of the Yellow Room , which had just come out, by a new author, Gaston Leroux, with an attractive young reporter as detective—his name was Rouletabille. It was a particularly baffling mystery, well worked out and planned …’ Writing of her early titles she notes that ‘ The Murder on the Links was slightly less in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, and was influenced, I think, by The Mystery of the Yellow Room . It had rather that high-flown, fanciful type of writing.’ Apart from its French setting, it is difficult to see what influence Leroux’s novel had on Poirot’s investigation of the murder of Monsieur Renaud at the Villa Geneviève in Merlin-sur-Mer. But a more telling similarity can be found in an early draft of the final chapter of The Mysterious Affair at Styles , in which Poirot, in a manner paralleling the Yellow Room ’s detective, explains the deductions which led to his identification of the murderer of Emily Inglethorp. At the request of her publisher she changed the manner of Poirot’s exposition, not only because of its possible similarity to the Leroux novel but also—despite its undoubted dramatic impact—because of its legal feasibility.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room first appeared in the French newspaper L’Illustration between September and November 1907, and in book form the following year. It was the first novel of a writer already well-known in France for his international newspaper journalism in L’Echo de Paris and Le Matin.

Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in May 1868 and completed his schooling in Normandy. He returned to Paris to study Law, graduating in 1889. Becoming disillusioned with the judicial system, he turned his not inconsiderable abilities to journalism, first as a theatre critic and court reporter for L’Echo . Subsequent, more significant, journalism at Le Matin included coverage of the infamous Dreyfus affair, the 1905 Russian Revolution and the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius; other stints included time in Morocco and Turkey. A further career-change saw him turn to fiction and The Mystery of the Yellow Room was the first of almost forty novels before his death in Nice in 1927.

The novel’s detective, Joseph Rouletabille, is one of the youngest in the pantheon of Great Detectives. The novel’s narrator is the self-effacing Jean Sainclair, who tells how he first met Rouletabille when the journalist was sixteen-and-a-half and already involved in solving a high-profile murder case, ‘the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf’. His precocity impressed the editor of L’Epoque newspaper who offered him a post and, thereby, an entrée into the world of crime detection. At the time of The Mystery of the Yellow Room he is a mere eighteen! His real name is Joseph Josephine and his nickname—Rouletabille, because his head is as round as a bullet—was bestowed by his fellow-journalists and ‘his good humour enchanted the most severe tempered and disarmed the most zealous’ of them. We discover more about his antecedents—and the explanation of his rather peculiar real name—in the course of his second case, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1908). (There are quite a few references throughout The Mystery of the YellowRoom to this follow-up novel.)