Gaston Leroux

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was born 6 May 1868 in France and worked as a journalist before turning to detective fiction. In 1908 he published The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a locked-room mystery that became one of the most celebrated in the genre. Two years later came Le Fantôme de l'Opéra — The Phantom of the Opera — which would outlive everything else he did. The 1925 silent film with Lon Chaney made it a ghost story for the ages, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical turned it into the defining Broadway juggernaut. Leroux died 15 April 1927, decades before his Phantom became inescapable.