Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) was born in Paris, studied law, and became a court reporter and then a roving correspondent for the newspaper Le Matin, covering trials and foreign events including the Russian revolution of 1905. He turned to fiction in his late thirties; The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), a locked-room puzzle solved by the young reporter Joseph Rouletabille, is one of the classic French detective novels. Le Fantôme de l'Opéra appeared as a newspaper serial in 1909-10. He wrote many further adventure and mystery novels and founded a film company in Nice before his death in 1927.
The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar.
