Gaston Leroux

• Born: May 6, 1868
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: April 15, 1927
• Place of death: Nice, France

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; thriller; horror

Principal Series: Joseph Rouletabille, 1907-1923; Chéri-Bibi, 1913-1925

Contribution

Gaston Leroux, a journalist by profession, proved himself an outstanding author of two different kinds of popular fiction: what the French term the roman policier and the roman d’adventure. Both these terms are broad and ambiguous: the first embraces more specifically the detective mystery, the police procedural, and the crime story. The second term embraces such vague categories as thriller, novel of suspense, and horror story as well as the more specific espionage story, gothic romance, Western, fantasy, and science fiction.

Leroux created two main series characters, Joseph Rouletabille and Chéri-Bibi. Rouletabille is a prodigy who displayed his mathematical genius at the age of nine. As a child, he was accused of a theft of which he was innocent and ran away from his boarding school in Eu. He lived on the street until age eighteen, when he became a reporter on the Paris paper L’Èpoque. Although a rationalist, he is not a worshiper of reason. He holds that it is incorrect to apply logical processes to external signs without first having grasped them intuitively. In his thinking, therefore, Rouletabille is as much a philosopher as a mathematician.

Chéri-Bibi, whose real name is Jean Mascart, grew up in Puys, near Dieppe. He was a butcher’s apprentice when he was mistakenly convicted for the murder of M. Bourrelier, a wealthy shipowner and the father of Cécily, the beautiful girl whom the poor butcher’s boy loved. Although Chéri-Bibi’s life was spared, he was sentenced to a long term in prison. His life then became a series of escapes and repeated imprisonments as he committed various crimes in his efforts to survive and to remain free. As an innocent man to whom society has meted out injustice, he blames his difficulties on fate. At the same time, he is a man who knows how to laugh.

Leroux’s first novel in his famous Joseph Rouletabille series, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908; also known as Murder in the Bedroom), is a detective mystery. It focuses on the solution of a mysterious crime by an unofficial detective whose method is opposed and superior to that of the police. In composing this novel, Leroux followed his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe, who in inventing the detective mystery had reacted negatively to the police-procedural narrative emerging in François-Eugène Vidocq’s work. Leroux also sought to go Poe one better, by using a locked room that, unlike Poe’s in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is hermetically sealed.

In following Poe rather than his important French predecessor Èmile Gaboriau—who was the first after Poe to focus on the process of criminal detection, in his L’Affaire Lerouge (1866; The Widow Lerouge, 1873)—Leroux composed a contrapolice narrative (Gaboriau’s detective, M. Lecoq, is an agent de police, and hence his novel is a police procedural and not a detective mystery). In trying to do something different from both Poe and Gaboriau, Leroux created with The Mystery of the Yellow Room a detective mystery that became a landmark in the history of this genre. Indeed, it remains a valued classic of the form.

Although his second Rouletabille novel, Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1908; The Perfume of the Lady in Black, 1909), proved less successful than his first, it is more important than the rest of the series. After 1909, the series becomes focused less on detective mysteries and more on adventures that hew closely to the political realities of the time.

Leroux’s legend of Chéri-Bibi begins with Chéri-Bibi (1913), a play. It continues with five novels, the last published in 1925. The books in this series belong to the subgenre of the crime novel, but they are concerned with mythic crime, with crime against the order of things as well as crime against the body and soul of humankind. At the same time their style is baroque, with an intertexuality showing the traces of archaeological myths, social codes, and literary techniques. They declare themselves immediately as something artificial, a matter of artistry.

Their Rabelaisian excess suggests that the Chéri-Bibi novels are not to be taken seriously; it would, however, be wrong to conclude that they are ridiculous melodrama. They are extraordinary books, whose texts are stuffed with signs of political, ethical, and aesthetic importance precursive of the age of modernity, of the primitive, repressed drives within humankind’s unconscious that underlie class prejudice and legal judgments, of the later developments of existentialist philosophy and negative theology, and of the post-structuralist view that literary texts are not products of innocence but laden with hidden meaning. The legend of Chéri-Bibi as told by Leroux amounts to tragicomedy of modernist proportions, although its fons et origo is archaeological and archetypal.

Biography

Gaston Leroux, a lawyer, journalist, and writer of fiction, was born in Paris on May 6, 1868, two years before the formation of the Third Republic. He was the son of a building contractor. Although Paris-born, Leroux always thought of himself as a Normande, as his mother was from Normandy. He lived for some years at Eu, inland from Le Tréport, while his father was engaged in the restoration of a castle. Leroux attended a school in Eu for a time; later, he was graduated from secondary school in Caen, Normandy.

Leroux removed himself to Paris, where he took up residence in the Latin Quarter and began the study of law, which he later practiced on completion of his studies. A description of his physique about this time by a contemporary indicates that he was a plump man with a curly, chestnut beard. From behind his spectacles, his dark eyes sparkled with malice, his countenance suggesting repressed irreverence. He overflowed with life and energy, and he seemed to have in him something of the street Arab and the Bacchic reveler. The whole judicial system frustrated and irritated him. Eventually, he quit. Leroux remained cynical about the judicial system the rest of his life, and this attitude pervades his fiction. His Rouletabille redresses the errors of human justice, and Chéri-Bibi, for a time at least, is both the victim of judicial error and the instrument of supreme justice.

After his stint as a lawyer, Leroux decided to enter the world of journalism. In 1892, he worked for the Ècho de Paris, first as a law reporter, then as a theater critic. Soon leaving the Ècho de Paris, he became a reporter on the Matin. It was not long before Leroux became one of the greatest journalists of his time. He interviewed illustrious persons, covered the Dreyfus affair, and became a foreign correspondent. He followed the peripatetics of the Otto Nordenskjöld expedition to Antarctica (1901-1903). He covered the Russian Revolution of 1905 and later interviewed the admiral who had quelled the rebellion in Moscow. In 1907, Leroux spent some time in Morocco and covered the eruption of Vesuvius in Italy. Too old to be mobilized at the outbreak of World War I, he covered the Armenian massacre by the Turks in 1915. At that point, Leroux decided that he had had enough of traveling to foreign places and terminated his career as a journalist.

Having to find another way to earn a living, Leroux hit on the writing of novels of adventure, including the roman policier. After several months of writing, he produced the manuscript of his first novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room. This story was first published in the September 7, 1907, issue of the magazine L’Illustration. It proved an immediate success and was succeeded the following year by The Perfume of the Lady in Black, which was almost as successful as his first novel. With these two books, Leroux became a world-famous author, and he was to continue to write many more successful novels until his death in Nice on April 16, 1927. As a skilled writer of fiction he has not been forgotten. Apart from the fine study of him by Antoinette Peské and Pierre Marty in their Les Terribles of 1951, the journal Bizarre devoted its first issue to him in 1953, and the journal Europe paid tribute to him in its June/July, 1981, issue.

Analysis

The first two volumes of the Rouletabille series, The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black, are Gaston Leroux’s masterpieces. These novels complement each other by rounding out the character and personality of their hero, the reporter-detective Joseph Rouletabille. They also involve Rouletabille’s confidant Sainclair (who also serves as the narrator), Mathilde Stangerson (the Lady in Black), Robert Darzac, and the notorious criminal Ballmeyer (alias Jean Roussel and Frédéric Larsan). Both stories involve the attempted murder of Mathilde Stangerson by the same persistent criminal whose identity is hidden from the rest of the characters until uncovered by Rouletabille, and both concern the mystery of how the criminal entered a hermetically sealed room to make such attempts and escaped thereafter.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black

The two novels differ in the times and places in which their stories occur in France. The Mystery of the Yellow Room takes place in 1892, principally at the Château du Glandier, located on the edge of the forest of Sainte-Genevieve, just above Èpinay-sur-Orge. It is the residence of the famous American-French chemist Professor Stangerson and his beautiful daughter Mathilde, who assists her father in his experiments regarding his theory of the “dissociation of matter” by electrical action that contradicted the law of the “conservation of matter.” Her bedroom, abutting her father’s laboratory, is the sealed “yellow room,” in which she is viciously attacked and seriously injured by the unknown criminal. The narrative of The Perfume of the Lady in Black takes place in 1895—although flashbacks take the reader to earlier times in the lives of Rouletabille, Stangerson, and Larsan. The main events take place at the Fort of Hercules, located at Roches Rouges, near Menton on the Côte d’Azur, the home of Arthur and Edith Rance. In The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Mathilde Stangerson and Robert Darzac are married. As husband and wife, they occupy adjoining bedrooms in the Square Tower of the fort, and these apartments are hermetically sealed when an attempt on the life of Darzac takes place inside, thus constituting another locked-room mystery. In addition, there are mysteries concerning the identification of Larsan and the one “body too many.”

What is not so plain about these two novels, among a number of subordinate matters, is their underlying mythical structures, which are hidden, particularly in The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by the technical device of displacement or the adaptation of myth to realistic criteria. In The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Rouletabille says of Mathilde Stangerson: “I saw her. . . . I breathed her—I inhaled the perfume of the lady in black. . . . How the memory of that perfume—felt by me alone—carries me back to the days of my childhood.” Although ignorant at this time that she is his mother, he—and he alone—senses the fragrance, one might say the aura, of the mother he knew as a child. The Perfume of the Lady in Black reveals that Rouletabille was separated from his mother at the age of nine. When he applied for the job of reporter in The Mystery of the Yellow Room, its editor in chief asked him his name. He replied “Joseph Josephine.” The editor remarked, “That’s not a name,” but added that it made no difference. Like Odysseus, Rouletabille has no name because he does not know the identity of his parents. His fellow reporters gave him the nickname Rouletabille because of his marble-shaped head.

Endowed with an Oedipus complex, Rouletabille— as it turns out—seeks to protect his mother from her male attacker and to identify him. Hence, from a mythical point of view, the plot of The Mystery of the Yellow Room amounts to a “search for the father,” although Rouletabille does not learn the identity of his father until The Perfume of the Lady in Black. Nevertheless, Rouletabille is powerfully intuitive; he is a psychic before he is a mathematician or a logician. He may seem a Telemachus and in a way he is. Not only does he search for his father but also, having learned of his father’s identity, Rouletabille cannot help admiring him for his bravery, wisdom, and cunning, which are the chief qualities of Odysseus. At the end of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, he allows Larsan (who is revealed as his father) to escape the law, ostensibly to protect his mother’s secret, but one suspects that his psychic feeling would not allow for both his father’s capture and the protection of his mother.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black begins by asking the question: Who is Rouletabille? In answering this question, the novel is more frank than The Mystery of the Yellow Room. It soon discloses that its plot is, in essence, a “search for the mother,” the father being found by accident, or, more likely from Leroux’s point of view, the finding of the father being the result of fate or destiny. Toward the conclusion of The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Oedipus-Rouletabille is prepared to kill Laius-Larsan if need be to protect Jocasta-Mathilde, but he does not have to because Larsan kills himself. After the reunion of the real Robert Darzac and Mathilde, Rouletabille resolves his Oedipus complex (he is now twenty-one and has become an adult) by contentedly leaving his mother in the protection of her new husband. He returns to Paris in favor of his journalistic responsibilities and a proposed trip to Russia.

If the two novels taken together have an overriding theme, it is an attack of pure empiricism: Presumptions based on what is seen alone may prove false if the reality lies in what has not been seen. Rouletabille is suspicious of appearances because they may be illusory. Hypotheses based on the intuitive and creative power of the imagination must form a circle within whose circumference reason and logic must be confined. Reasoning has both good and bad ends. Observations must be instinctive, and logic must not be twisted in favor of preconceived ideas. Rouletabille says to Larsan: “It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it.” Facts are empty sacks that will not stand upright until filled with correct interpretations.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black differ considerably in style and treatment. The style of the former is plain, factual, largely unemotional. Descriptions are sparse, and little or no use is made of simile. Nevertheless, the style is interesting—indeed, it is absorbing—from beginning to end. On the other hand, The Perfume of the Lady in Black is more complicated and lavish. It contains more elaborate descriptions and more imaginative speculations. Leroux’s treatment of his subject in The Perfume of the Lady in Black is far more emotional than that in The Mystery of the Yellow Room. For example, he remarks of Larsan’s attack on the Square Tower:

In a siege as mysterious as this, the attack may be in everything or in nothing. . . . The assailant is as still as the grave . . . and the enemy approaches the walls walking in his stocking feet. . . . It is, perhaps, in the very stillness itself, but again, it may, perhaps, be in the spoken word. It is in a tone, in a sigh, in a breath. It is a gesture. . . . It may be in all which is hidden . . . all that is revealed—in everything which one sees and which one does not see.

In The Perfume of the Lady in Black Rouletabille is continually losing control of his emotions, then regaining his concentration. As a result, the narrator, Sainclair, is sometimes required to sustain the story line. This frenetic seesawing between emotionalism and calmness veils from the reader the novel’s development and its unity.

Although Leroux’s work is rooted in nineteenth century melodrama and the prototypical detective fiction of Poe and his followers, it also anticipates the post-World War II vogue for serious fiction that appropriates the conventions of the detective novel only to subvert them. The difference is that, while in the works of modern writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Leonardo Sciascia the subversion is intentional, in Leroux’s baroque fictions it may have been unconscious.

Principal Series Characters:

• Joseph Rouletabille , an investigative reporter and amateur sleuth, is employed by the Paris daily L’Èpoque. Rouletabille’s editor assigns him to investigate “the mystery of the yellow room,” and the brilliance that the reporter displays in solving this and later mysteries brings him world renown as a detective.
• Chéri-Bibi is regarded by the public as the king of criminals. After being wrongly sentenced to prison for murder, he escapes and solves the original murder but is imprisoned again. Another escape leads to a third imprisonment.

Bibliography

Flynn, John L. Phantoms of the Opera: The Face Behind the Mask. Rev. ed. Owings Mills, Md.: Galactic Books, 2006. This study, originally primarily focused on the film adaptations, was revised to take advantage of the popularity of the stage production of the 1990’s.

Hogle, Jerrold E. The Undergrounds of the “Phantom of the Opera”: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Study of the tropes of sublimation and repression in Phantom of the Opera and its many film and stage adaptations. Bibliographic references and index.

Murch, A. The Development of the Detective Novel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958. Argues for Leroux’s importance in the history of the genre.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Les Origines du Roman Policier: A Wartime Wireless Talk to the French. Translated by Suzanne Bray. Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, England: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2003. Address to the French by the famous English mystery author, discussing the history of French detective fiction and its relation to the English version of the genre.

Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Places Leroux in a lineage of crime-fiction writers, focusing on his role in the evolution of the genre in France and the influence of the French on British and American authors.

Thomson, H. Douglas. Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1978. Places Leroux alongside his fellow “masters” in the process of comparing the French detective story with other national crime literatures.