Gaston Leroux (May 6, 1868, Paris – April 15, 1927, Nice) was a French journalist and novelist.
In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l'opéra, 1910) which has been made into several film and stage productions (see Phantom of the Opera).
Leroux began working as a court reporter and theater critic for L'Echo de Paris in 1890, but 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 left journalism in 1907 and began writing fiction, his first being a mystery novel entitled Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1908; The Mystery of the Yellow Room), starring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille. The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an important work in the history of dectective fiction as it was the first "locked-room puzzle," which has become a staple in the genre. Leroux's contribution to French detective fiction is considered as parallel to Edgar Allan Poe's in America and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's in the UK.
He died of uraemia.
Leroux's novels
These include:
- The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908)
- The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1908)
- The Phantom of the Opera (1911)
- The Secret of the Night (1914)
- The Bride of the Sun (1915)
- The Man Who Came Back From the Dead (1916)
- The Veiled Prisoner (1923)
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