Gaston Leroux

After growing up in Normandy, Gaston Leroux returned to his city of birth, Paris, at the age of eighteen. There, he became a lawyer and wrote accounts of trials for a newspaper to supplement his earnings. His account of an anarchist attack on the Chamber of Deputies earned him a strong reputation as a journalist, allowing him to become the judicial columnist for the most important Parisian newspaper. Already known as a talented reporter, he was then sent to Russia in 1905, where he covered the 1905 Russian Revolution, a bloody premise to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Two years later, he published a detective novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, in serial installments. This story, in which the protagonist seeks to discover how an assassin could escape a room that was locked from within, became so successful that Leroux decided to abandon journalism and dedicate himself to fiction. His experience as a lawyer and a journalist allowed him to recount crimes and mysteries with striking detail, and he became known as a writer specialized in detective stories. He wrote The Phantom of the Opera serially in 1909 and 1910, and published over forty novels and short stories throughout his life. In 1909, he was made a “Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur,” the highest honor for extraordinary contributions to the French nation.