Leroux, Gaston - The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Reread this a week or so ago. I have no idea why it is ranked so highly as a detective story (by Carr and the like). Even the 'impossible crime' solutions are ludicrous. One problem, however, might be that the English translation of my book (the Dover edition of the version that was published in England a year after the original French edition) is VERY poor, with lots of errors that don't even make any sense, such as saying Murderers when there was no murder, confusing right with left, telling us the name of somebody as something new when we have already known it for 20 pages, etc. Worse are the contradictions and improbabilities - the ultimate villain had an iron-clad alibi (he was in London at the time), so how could that have been faked? How come footprints are found on hallway rugs in the house even when no mud was tracked in and whoever laid them did not have cleats on his shoes? How can you take seriously Roulettabile's superimposing a piece of paper over a footprint in the mud and cutting out an outline of it with scissors, then identifying another footprint as being by the same person by superimposing his cutout? The melodramatic plot itself is both improbable and doesn't really apply to any of the characters who did what they supposedly did. The butler did it (not in this case) because he was secretly in love with Mlle. and therefore had to kill her! Leroux was a very sloppy writer. This book is absolutely absurd.

Wyatt James