The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the first locked-room mystery crime fiction novels. 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. Also included in this edition is the thriller novel The Secret of the Night . Gaston 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. His novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is also one of the most famous locked-room mysteries ever.