Gaston Leroux 
The Mystery of the Yellow Room 

The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels written by the author of The Phantom of the Opera. It is the first novel starring fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille, and concerns a complex and seemingly impossible crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Agatha Christie admired the novel and in her early years said she would like to try writing such a book.