By Gaston Leroux.

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.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1908) 206 pages.