William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the eldest son
of a successful painter, William Collins. He studied law and was
admitted to the bar but never practiced his nominal profession,
devoting his time to writing instead. His first published book was
a biography of his father, his second a florid historical romance.
The first hint of his later talents came
with Basil (1852), a vivid tale of seduction, treachery,
and revenge.
In 1851 Collins had met Charles Dickens, who would become his close
friend and mentor. Collins was soon writing unsigned articles and
stories for Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, and his
novels were serialized in its pages. Collins brought out the
boyish, adventurous side of Dickens’s character; the two novelists
traveled to Italy, Switzerland, and France together, and their
travels produced such lighthearted collaborations as “The Lazy Tour
of Two Idle Apprentices.” They also shared a passion for the
theater, and Collins’s melodramas, notably “The Frozen Deep,” were
presented by Dickens’s private company, with Dickens and Collins in
leading roles.
Collins’s first mystery novel was Hide and Seek (1853).
His first popular success was The Woman in White (1860),
followed by No Name (1862), Armadale (1866),
and The Moonstone (1868), whose Sergeant Cuff became a
prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Collins’s
concentration on the seamier side of life did not endear him to the
critics of his day, but he was among the most popular of Victorian
novelists. His meticulously plotted, often violent novels are now
recognized as the direct ancestors of the modern mystery novel and
thriller.
Collins’s private life was an open secret among his friends. He had
two mistresses, one of whom bore him three children. His later
years were marred by a long and painful eye disease. His novels,
increasingly didactic, declined greatly in quality, but he
continued to write by dictating to a secretary until 1886. He died
in 1889.
"The first and greatest of English detective novels."
--T. S. Eliot
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