The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room: Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille, Reporter is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels (such that a murder or other crime is apparently committed under impossible circumstances). It is written by Gaston Leroux, first published in France in the literary supplement of L'illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then as a one volume book in 1908.

It is the first novel starring fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille.

The story concerns a complex and seemingly impossible crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Such is the mechanical and logistic complexity of the puzzle that Leroux provides the reader with detailed and precise diagrams and floorplans illustrating the scene of the crime. Further impossible problems emerge as the story progresses towards a dramatic d'nouement. The emphasis of the story is firmly on the intellectual challenge to the reader, who will almost certainly be hard pressed to unravel every detail of the situation.

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.