Gaston Leroux

French · 1868 to 1927

Born on May 6, 1868, in Paris, Gaston Leroux was the son of a building contractor, and as a young man he received a substantial inheritance from his father, much of which he gambled and spent within a few years. He studied law and qualified as a lawyer, but the courtroom drew him as a spectator rather than a practitioner. He became a court reporter and theater critic for the newspaper L'Echo de Paris, then a roving foreign correspondent for Le Matin, filing dispatches from Russia, Morocco, and across Europe during two decades of restless travel. The work taught him to write fast and to build a scene from a few hard facts, a discipline he carried into fiction when he left journalism around 1907. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) introduced the young reporter-detective Joseph Rouletabille and is regarded as an early masterpiece of the locked-room puzzle, a form Leroux loved for its appearance of impossibility. He followed it with The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1908) and a long series of Rouletabille adventures. The Phantom of the Opera (1910), the book by which the world now knows him, grew partly from his fascination with the real Palais Garnier, its underground lake, and a chandelier that had fallen during a performance. He also created the convict hero Cheri-Bibi across several novels. Leroux was a heavy, jovial man with a love of food and company. He died on April 15, 1927, in Nice, at the age of fifty-eight, of a urinary infection following surgery, his masked figure beneath the opera house long outliving the journalist who dreamed it.