Gaston Leroux 
La poupée sanglante 

Au moment où Leroux compose La Poupée sanglante (1923), la France est encore sous le choc du procès d’Henri Landru, qui sert de déclic à la genèse du roman.

Mais se contenter d’un héros devenu tueur en série par simple cupidité aurait été indigne de l’imagination de Leroux. Il a donc fait du relieur Masson l’instrument d’un grand dessein qui le dépasse: le mystère de la vie et de la mort. Leroux dépoussière les vieux mythes de Dracula et Frankenstein, les débarrasse de leurs artifices gothiques et les modernise grâce à un habillage scientifique. Benedict Masson ne proclame-t-il pas: ‘ De nos jours le vampirisme ne peut être que scientifique…

‘Une des meilleures oeuvres de Gaston Leroux, trop souvent méconnue au profit des Aventures de Rouletabille ou de Chéri-Bibi.

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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.