The complete shorter fiction
(Book)

Originally published: London : Robinson Publishing, 1995.

William 'Wilkie' Collins, author of the perennial favourites The Moonstone and The Woman in White, friend and adviser to Charles Dickens and acclaimed as the grandfather of the modern detective story, was one of the nineteenth century's most popular authors. Indeed, Dickens described him as 'the writer who would come ahead of all the field'. He was born in London in 1824, the son of a landscape painter. After a private education and two years in Italy, he trained in the law and began to practise in 1851. However he also became friends with Charles Dickens and quickly swapped his legal wig for the quill pen of literature. He became probably the first writer in English fiction to deal with the business of crime and detection, and as a result achieved great popularity in his lifetime. Many of his novels were published in Dickens' periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round including The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In his shorter fiction, Collins retains all the skill and energy of his novels. He had a mastery of plot that even Dickens admired, and all the delicacy in drawing character that one associates with this fertile period of literature.