Gaston Leroux

Balaoo (Dodo Press) Gaston Leroux

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (1868-1927) was a French journalist, detective and novelist. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fant?'me de l'Opéra, 1910), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, such as the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney; and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical. Leroux went to school in Normandy and studied law in Paris, graduating in 1889. Then in 1890, he began working as a court reporter and theatre critic for L'Écho de Paris. His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In 1905 he was present at and covered the Russian Revolution. He suddenly left journalism in 1907, and began writing fiction. He first wrote a mystery novel entitled Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (1908; The Mystery of the Yellow Room), starring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille. Leroux's contribution to French detective fiction is considered a parallel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's in the United Kingdom and Edgar Allan Poe's in America.