The Mystery of the Yellow Room (reprint)

..“.a strictly fair-play, by-the-book murder conundrum, brilliant, logical and down-to-earth. It is what Leroux does with this honourable, limited format that makes it so rich and strange. Taking advantage of the mechanical artificiality and unreality of this fictive world where violent death evinces no stronger emotion than curiosity and makes hardly a ripple in the pool of everyday life, he makes the realistic narrative background as bizarre as the plot it frames. This is what we’re not used to, and what, 90 years later, makes this as compelling and crazy a nightmare as the Surrealists ever dreamed.” “I’d offer a reward of 500 if you can guess the solution to this crime.”

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (1868-1927) was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantome de l’Opera, 1910), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical. His novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is also one of the most famous locked-room mysteries ever.