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It’s hard to imagine Philo Vance, Lord Peter, or Ellery Queen in quite such a predicament:

The Phantom Clue is the most personal of Rouletabille’s many adventures, beginning, surprisingly, with a situation closer to French farce than a mystery novel. In France, Rouletabille had even greater success with films, a television series, and numerous graphic albums featuring his adventures. Most lists of the classics of the genre still include this tale, Leroux’s first venture into the detective novel, and it is in print currently from Black Coat Press and before that from Dover books. If readers know of Rouletabille today it is for Leroux’s detective masterpiece, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a famous and still effective application of the locked room mystery unraveled by the brilliant teen age sleuth (he’s only eighteen in his first case), Rouletabille.

Lafitte, 1922).Įric, the damned and haunted “hero” of The Phantom of the Opera, is Gaston Leroux’s best known creation today, thanks to numerous films and television productions and the long running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but in his own day and time, Leroux was as well known for his thrillers featuring the frightening facial aspect of picaresque criminal Cheri Bibi, his weird novels, and the adventures of the arrogant genius, young journalist detective Joseph Rouletabille (an influence on Herge’s teen journalist Tintin almost certainly). Published earlier in the US as The Slave Bangle, John Long, hardcover, 1925, a translation by Hannaford Bennett of Le crime du Rouletabille (Paris, France: P.