A Famous Locked Room Mystery

In the first chapter of The Honjin Murders by Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo, published 1946, the fictitious narrator says:

"The locked room murder mystery—a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point in his or her career. The murder takes place in a room with no apparent way for the killer to enter or exit. ... As a writer of detective novels myself, I intended one day to try my hand at one of these, and now I’ve been unexpectedly blessed—one has fallen right into my lap. I know it’s shocking but I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the killer for devising such a fiendish method to stab this man and woman. When I first heard the story, I immediately racked my brain to think of any similar cases among all the novels I’ve read. The first that came to mind were Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Maurice Leblanc’s The Teeth of the Tiger; then there’s The Canary Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case, both by S.S. Van Dine; and finally, Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders." (p. 10).

The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Serialized in French in 1907.
Published in book form, 1908.
I read it this week.

Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) was a highly influential and popular French novelist. While the author is better-known for his 1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera, on which the famous musical is based, his Mystery of the Yellow Room is also highly admired. It has been reissued frequently since its first publication, and has been made into a number of films in French and in English. 

As illustrated in the quote above, Leroux's novel is often cited as a model of the locked room detective story, including mentions in works by Agatha Christie, John Dickinson Carr, and especially Seishi Yokomizo (whose work I'm in the process of reading). Because of its fame, this novel probably also influenced many other mystery writers. I decided to read it because Yokomizo praised it so highly, and because so many mid-20th-century classic authors loved to create locked room mysteries. I suspect that the first locked-room tale I ever read was the Nancy Drew mystery The Hidden Staircase, the second in this series about the girl detective that introduced me to detective fiction when I was a girl!

My Reaction to The Mystery of the Yellow Room

I'm sorry to report that despite being a big fan of mystery stories from the past and the present, and from a variety of countries and different authors -- I didn't like this one at all! So disappointing. I was particularly unhappy with the final explanation of the sequence of events. At the very end, the author revealed a number of details that were never hinted at whatsoever during the narrative. I didn't feel as if I was reading the same story at the end as the one I’d been following all along. Further, many unneeded and superfluous details about the numerous people trying to solve the crime caused the story to be somewhat tedious.

The central character, Rouletabille, a young reporter whose success was hinted from the beginning, and who eventually solved the mystery, was very secretive, and often refused to answer the narrator when asked what he was thinking and discovering. When this happens in mystery novels, it reduces my respect for the author, because it makes it too easy to produce a final explanation that wasn't dependent on the clues dispersed in the actual novel. I don't mind one or two unstated clues, but I think that a good mystery author ought to present a kind of puzzle that the reader could at least partially solve. At the very least, the explanation at the end should be an AH-HA moment for an attentive reader! Not here.

There was already a tradition of locked room mystery stories by the early twentieth century. In fact, Leroux's narrator acknowledges this when surveying the situation:

"Yes," said the young reporter …, "The Yellow Room was as tightly shut as an iron safe." 

 

"That," I said, "is why this mystery is the most surprising I know. Edgar Allan Poe, in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' invented nothing like it. The place of that crime was sufficiently closed to prevent the escape of a man; but there was that window through which the monkey, the perpetrator of the murder, could slip away! But here, there can be no question of an opening of any sort.” (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, p. 42)

Although I didn't enjoy it, I'm glad to finally have read this highly admired classic! And I now have a rather intriguing reading list of more locked room mysteries to read.

Review © 2023 mae sander.