Gaston Leroux 
La machine à assassiner 

La peur s’est à nouveau abattue sur Paris ! Une étrange créature sème l’effroi en l’île Saint-Louis, dans le sillage de Bénédict Masson que ses terribles méfaits menèrent -malgré ses véhéments cris d’innocence- à la guillotine. Sur les pas du meurtrier, celle que l’on ne tarde pas à surnommer dans la ville ‘ la machine à assassiner ‘ va irrésistiblement nous entraîner dans le sillon vermillon qu’a tracé la poupée sanglante.

Car si elle est muette, la créature n’en exprime pas moins avec l’écriture du … guillotiné ! Les mêmes lieux, les mêmes morts rejaillissent, et le mystère ne se dissipera que grâce au magistral génie romanesque de Gaston Leroux.

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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.