The Perfume of the Lady in Black

In The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Joseph Rouletabille, the young journalist turned detective, is once more pitted against his arch-enemy Frédéric Larsan. The mysterious crime committed in the Square Tower challenges even Rouletabille’s powers of logic and deduction. But this is also a novel which – through its implicit accommodation of recent developments in the new science of psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex – was even further ahead of its time than The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Without The Perfume of the Lady in Black, novels such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho (and Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation) would hardly have been possible.

“…my favourite of all locked-room novels has at last been reissued. The Mystery of the Yellow Room was written in 1908 by Gaston Leroux, better known for The Phantom of the Opera, and has never been bettered. The first in a series of novels to feature the intrpid if naive young reporter and sleuth, Rouletabille, it pits him against the dark soul of the detective Frédéric Larsan and the murky secrets of the Stangerson family. Considering when the book was written, it remains remarkably modern, a page-turner whose exploration of the dark side can still send a shiver up your back. Naturally, the solution to the central crime is a twist within a tortuous twist for which even a Mensa reader will be quiet unprepared. We must hope Dedalus follows up soon with the outrageously complex and heart-breaking The Perfume of he Lady in Black, a sequel which revisits Rouletabille’s first case and mischievously casts a very different light on its resolution and motivations. A masterpiece.” – Maxim Jakubowski in Time Out