'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux
'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux

The good

  • It’s a genuinely good locked room mystery.

  • The two key plot twists are super clever: I loved the two key twists: (1) the way the murderer vanished from the locked room the first time was that he wasn’t there when it was locked in the first place, but had actually attacked hours before and (2) the way the murderer vanished from the various chase scenes was to turn back into one of the characters in the story.

  • Rouletabille makes good use of logic and deductions to figure everything out.

The not so good

  • I did not like the writing style at all. It feels like it hasn’t aged well: the dialog is stilted, the way the plot is presented is confusing, the attempt to portray things as a reporter’s testimony adds nothing, and so on. I feel like a better-written version of this book would be one of the greatest mystery stories of all time, but as it is, it can be hard to read at times.

Rating: 4 stars