Gaston Leroux 
Un homme dans la nuit 

À bord d’un train traversant les États-Unis, le magnat Jonathan Smith est attaqué par sa protégée et future femme Mary et par son secrétaire personnel, Charley, qui est accessoirement l’amant de la belle Mary, dans le but de lui dérober ses richesses.

Laissé pour mort après avoir été jeté de la plateforme du train, Smith est en réalité recueilli par une tribu indienne. Le milliardaire déchu prépare alors une vengeance des plus terribles dont son fils William sera l’instrument, des années plus tard dans le Paris huppé de la Belle Époque…

About the author

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.

In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, 1910), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, such as the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical. It was also the basis of the 1990 novel Phantom by Susan Kay.

Leroux went to school in Normandy and studied law in Paris, graduating in 1889. He inherited millions of francs and lived wildly until he nearly reached bankruptcy. Then in 1890, he began working as a court reporter and theater critic for L’Écho de Paris. His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In 1905 he was present at and covered the Russian Revolution. Another case he was present at involved the investigation and deep coverage of an opera house in Paris, later to become a ballet house. The basement consisted of a cell that held prisoners in the Paris Commune, which were the rulers of Paris through much of the Franco-Prussian war.