The Mystery of the Yellow Room (in French Le mystère de la chambre jaune) is a mystery novel written by French author Gaston Leroux. One of the first locked-room mystery novels, it was first published serially in France and then in book form. It is the first novel starring fictional reporter Joseph Rouletabille and concerns a complex, and seemingly impossible, crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room.
Leroux provides the reader with detailed, precise diagrams and floor plans illustrating the crime scene. 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. The novel finds its continuation in the 1908 novel The Perfume of the Lady in Black.
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (6 May 1868[1] – 15 April 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 Fantôme de l'Opéra, 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 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.