Gaston Leroux

Born on May 6, 1868, Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux grew up
in a life of relative comfort, developing a love of sailing and
swimming, and discovering a serious interest in literature
during his childhood. He wrote poetry for his own
enjoyment, and was a top student who was seemingly
headed for a career as a lawyer. Even as he began
studying for that profession, however, Leroux had started
writing short fiction and poems for publication. By the time
Leroux earned his law degree and was beginning his
practice, he was looking toward a career as a writer.
Leroux became a drama critic for L'Echo de Paris, which
had previously published his poetry, and soon turned to
covering criminal trials, where his training as an attorney
made him uniquely qualified as a reporter. His work soon
moved him to more prominent newspapers and into the
field of serious investigative journalism; his own exploits,
which included sneaking into jails in disguise to interview
prisoners, soon rivaled the attraction of his stories. Writing
for the Paris newspaper Le Matin, Leroux was among the
earliest modern celebrity journalists, his name on a story
guaranteeing the sales of an issue. Soon, he had his own
international beat, crossing Europe, Asia, and Africa, often
anonymously or in outright disguise, reporting on wars
around the world and such events as the Turkish slaughter
of Armenians, strife in the Middle East, and the
Ruso-Japanese War. He also took a hand, if not as
prominent as that of Emil Zola, in the exposure of the
scandal surrounding the prosecution of Captain Alfred
Dreyfuss. Leroux began writing fiction professionally with
the start of the 20th century.

His first novel, The Seeking of the Morning Treasures,
based on the life and supposed legacy of the bandit
Cartouche, appeared in 1903 as a serialized work in Le
Matin, and created a major public sensation in Paris.
Leroux's first major critical success came in 1907 when he
published The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which
introduced the character of reporter/sleuth Joseph
Rouletabille. In its time, this novel was considered the best
-- if not necessarily the first -- example of a logical detective
story in which the murder is committed in a sealed room, a
mystery subgenre that was later the purview of such
celebrated authors as John Dickson Carr. It was followed a
year later by The Perfume of the Lady in Black and six more
subsequent sequels. But Leroux also had a darker side, a
fixation on the grimmer sides of life and death, and on
horror and fantasy, as well as aspects of the macabre. In
1911, he published The Phantom of the Opera. It sold more
steadily over time than some, but not so much as to make it
stand out. It was the movies that made the difference.
Leroux's books first started coming to the screen in 1913,
when his novel Balaoo became the basis for a movie of
that title. It was to be six years before his next screen
adaptation, Mystery of the Yellow Room, would appear.
Fate intervened in the guise of Universal Pictures, whose
success with The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, a tale
of horror, thrills, and mystery done on a grand and vastly
expensive scale, had sent the studio in search other
properties that lent themselves to such treatment. The
Phantom of the Opera seemed a logical choice, and it
became one of the most enduring classics of the silent era,
produced on an immense scale on outsized sets built
specifically for the film (some of which were still standing
into the new millennium), with images that have remained
familiar to the present day. Leroux died in 1927, at age 59,
from complications following surgery, two years after The
Phantom of the Opera's release. In a bizarre episode in
1929, Universal announced plans for a sequel, "The Return
of the Phantom," ostensibly written by Leroux.
But no sequel was ever made, but Universal did recut and
partly reshoot the 1925 film and adapt it to sound in 1929
and 1930.
As we have read, The Phantom of the Opera was his most
famous novel.
Its story is a chimera, a wonderful machinery destined to
pass from a worth of lights to a world of shadows, in a
constant system of atraction/repulsion where Love fights
between Life and Death heartbeats.
To read this book online, click here.

Do you want to read Leroux's great granddaughter
interview? Click here.

Please, don't copy this text and photos without my permission.
Ladyghost with Veronique, Leroux's great
granddaughter