Gaston Leroux
1868–1927 · France
a reporter who swore the phantom was real
Leroux qualified in law in Paris and briefly practised, and might have stayed a comfortable Parisian gentleman: at his father's death in 1889 he inherited a small fortune, said to be near a million francs. He gambled and spent almost all of it within a few years, and the ruin drove him into journalism to earn a living.
He turned out to be very good at it. As a court reporter, theatre critic and then foreign correspondent for Le Matin he covered crimes, trials and the opera, and travelled widely; in 1905 he was in Russia for the revolution, filing from close to the events. That reporter's habit — the insistence that a story be documented, dated and sworn to — never left him, and in 1907 he abandoned the newspapers for fiction.
His detective Rouletabille, hero of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, is himself a young journalist, and its locked-room puzzle is still studied by writers of the form. The Phantom of the Opera followed in 1910, framed as a piece of investigative reporting into a haunting the narrator swears was real. Leroux wrote steadily until his death at Nice in 1927, and is now read almost entirely for one book the world knows chiefly through other hands.