Gaston Leroux

Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) was born in Paris, trained as a lawyer, and worked instead as a court reporter and then as a foreign correspondent for Le Matin, covering the Russian upheavals of 1905. He turned to fiction in his forties: The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), a locked-room puzzle introducing the reporter Rouletabille, and The Phantom of the Opera (1910). He died at Nice.