Today, I would like to share with you a book that I’ve just finished. It’s a very famous French crime novel. It was published in 1907 and was adapted to the cinema many times. I obviously speak about the well-known Mystery of the yellow room written by Gaston Leroux. To sum up this story, I would only say that a very mysterious murder was committed. The aggressor managed to escape from a totally sealed room (door closed, windows too, no fireplace …). Two characters have to solve this case: a policeman named Larsan and a reporter named Rouletabille, there both are known to have already solved famous mysteries. The narrator is Saintclair, a lawyer and a closed-friend from Rouletabille. He accompanies and helps him. At the beginning, the story makes me remind of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short novel intituled The Adventure of the Speckled Band and of another short novel written by Edgar Allan Poe entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue (in both stories characters were murdered in a closed room). Though, the author wants to stop us in our reasoning. Indeed, the narrator, Saintclair, pronounces these words (it’s an approximately translation that I made seeing as the author was French so the quotation was in French): “this mystery is the most surprising that I know, even in the imaginary domain. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Poe invented nothing similar. The crime place was close enough to not let the murderer flee but there was a window by which the killer could run away. But here, there is no opening.” and in a note from the author: “Conan Doyle talks about the same kind of mystery in the short novel intituled The Adventure of the Speckled Band. In a sealed room, a terrible murder is done. […] In the room, there was an adequate air intake to allow the assassin to get in and out the room.” In this way, we understand that G. Leroux was ‘in competition’ with these two writers. Like Conan Doyle and Poe, he uses the principle of a detective who came back in all of his novels (the detective in question is Rouletabille and he wrote more than ten sequels to the Mystery of the yellow room). Nevertheless, I’ve read the three stories (whose I talked) and they are all different. The Mystery of the yellow room is certainly the one that I prefer: I liked the writing of the author, characters that he created and, obviously, the resolution of the case. I would like to read the direct sequel intituled The Perfume of the woman in black.
Do you have already read this book? If not, would you like to read it?