The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. It was first published in France in 1908. It is the first novel starring fictional detective 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 floorplans illustrating the scene of the crime. 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.
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (1868–1927) was a French journalist and author of detective fiction and 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.