Gaston Leroux

The Mystery of the Yellow Room Gaston Leroux

Publisher Marketing: In Which We Begin Not to Understand It is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole truth of the prodigious case known as that of The Yellow Room, out of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, propos of a recent nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grandcross of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal-in an article, miserable for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy-had not resuscitated a terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished to be for ever forgotten. The Yellow Room! Who now remembers this affair which caused so much ink to flow fifteen years ago? Events are so quickly forgotten in Paris. Has not the very name of the Nayves trial and the tragic history of the death of little Menaldo passed out of mind? And yet the public attention was so deeply interested in the details of the trial that the occurrence of a ministerial crisis was completely unnoticed at the time. Now The Yellow Room trial, which, preceded that of the Nayves by some years, made far more noise. Contributor Bio:  LeRoux, Gaston Gaston Leroux was born on May 6, 1868 in Paris, but was brought up in Normandy. While attending law school in Paris, his short stories and poetry were published in Left Bank magazines. He gave up law after three years to work for a local paper. It was when he was working for the daily newspaper, Le Martin, that he gained fame for interviewing celebrities. From there he travelled to Asia, Europe, Africa and Russia, often in disguise, to get to leads for stories, and soon became a celebrity himself. In 1907, he decided to become a full-time novelist. In 1919, he formed a film company in Nice, where he had settled in 1908. His final home was in Rue Gambetta, where he died unexpectedly of uremia on April 15, 1927.