The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Joseph Rouletabille #1)

The Mystery of the Yellow Room is a novel written by French author Gaston Leroux. One of the first locked-room mystery novels, it was first published in the periodical L’Illustration in parts from September 1907 to November 1907. It was then published as a complete novel in 1908.
The story is of a newspaper reporter, Joseph Rouletabille, and a complex, and seemingly impossible, crime in which the criminal seems to have disappeared 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.