News about Gaston Leroux

By her own account, Agatha Christie's key inspirations for Poirot were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Joseph Rouletabille, an amateur French sleuth from the pen of Gaston Leroux, better known as the author of The Phantom Of The Opera. It was Leroux's The Mystery Of The Yellow Room that instigated a conversation between Agatha and her sister Madge about writing a detective novel. Agatha further reflected that contemporary events persuaded her to make her detective Belgian. In An Autobiography, she wrote that during World War I , 'We had quite a colony of Belgian refugees living in the parish of Tor. Why not make my detective a Belgian?' Agatha was honest about the influence of Sherlock Holmes. She knew she was 'writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition - eccentric detective [Poirot], stooge assistant [Captain Hastings], with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp.'

Gaston Leroux and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, which debuted in 1986, has a nod to the 1909 novel by Palais Garnier's opera house. In both the musical and the book, the opulent Palais Garnier Opera House is said to be haunted by a mystery figure referred to as the Phantom of the Opera. The Palais Garnier experience includes a live performance, dinner in an ornate rehearsal room backstage, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the elaborate 19th-century building, which included the inspiration for the phantom's lair in the novel and musical.