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Mystery of the Yellow Room, The (MP3) - 2006 [Audio Book] |
Overall Rating
My Rating
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Not Rated |
| Year : |
2006 |
| Playtime : |
420 Minutes |
| Lang : |
English |
| Genre : |
Fiction |
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At the heart of this novel is an enigma. How could a murder take place in a locked room, which shows no sign of being entered?
The novel is also about the rivalry to solve the case between a detective, Frédéric Larsan, and a young investigative journalist, Joseph Rouletabille. Larsan finds a suspect who is put on trial, only to have him cleared by Rouletabille, who reveals in the most dramatic fashion the identity of the real murderer.
In Joseph Rouletabille, Gaston Leroux has created one of the most astute and brilliant detectives in European fiction. Rouletabille earns his living as a newspaper reporter, and he is notable for his ordinariness, making him different from Edgar Allan Poe’s Chevalier Dupin and Author Donan Coyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But like Dupin and Holmes, he too has his faithful cohort, his admiring friend Sainclair. Although Rouletabille is young, his pronouncements often resemble those of his famous predecessors: “The evidence supplied by the senses only is no proof at all,” he remarks.
Besides his excellent manipulation of plot, Leroux’s title for the book is another of his masterstrokes. It alerts the reader that the setting of the novel is the “yellow” 1890s, a time when this color had become associated in the mind of the general public with all that was unhealthy, corrupt, exotic, and strange.
With The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Leroux led in the development of detective fiction as a genre. He managed to combine the weird, creepy atmosphere of the nineteenth-century thriller, the meticulous logic of the Sherlock Holmes’s stories, and the techniques of early twentieth-century sensationalist journalism. This book is a clear anticipation of the direction that detective fiction would take in the hands of such authors as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
Both The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Phantom of the Opera owe much to the author’s journalism background. As a writer, he was not only terse but also highly inventive. The stories are continually interrupted by fresh developments, just as is a news story in the popular press that breaks over a period of days or weeks. In the hands of Leroux, the detective novel becomes the fictional equivalent of investigative journalism.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room was described in its time as “a classic tour de force on the ‘least-likely-person’ theme” and still remains so today. |
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| Mystery of the Yellow Room, The (MP3) Audio Book Details |
| Other : |
Unabridged |
| Year : |
2006 |
| Playtime : |
420 Minutes |
| Lang : |
English |
| Release : |
Blackstone AudioBooks |
| Genre : |
Fiction, Mystery & Suspense |
| Rating : |
NR - Not Rated |
| Category : |
AudioBooks |
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