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.
