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In The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Joseph Rouletabille, the young journalist turned detective, is once more pitted against his arch-enemy Frederic Larsan. The mysterious crime committed in the Square Tower again directly challenges the reader to find the correct solution - though to do so tests even Rouletabille's power 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.
About the author
Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) gave up a career as a lawyer to become a journalist in his mid twenties. Though today he is best known for his novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) during his lifetime his fame rested on his detective novels, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black(1909). Amongst the greatest novels of the golden age of crime fiction they introduced an eighteen year old journalist turned detective, Rouletabille, to the world.
