Wilkie Collins

Born in London in 1824, Wilkie Collins was the son of the landscape painter William Collins. He spent part of his youth in Italy, later studied law, and turned to writing in the 1840s. His friendship and collaboration with Charles Dickens helped raise his profile, and by the 1860s he had become one of the most popular novelists in Britain.

Collins is remembered as a leading writer of sensation fiction and as an early pioneer of detective storytelling. The Woman in White brought him wide fame, and The Moonstone is often singled out as a landmark in the development of the detective novel. His fiction combined intricate plots with memorable characters and a strong interest in injustice, especially the limited rights of women in Victorian society.

He continued writing novels, plays, and short fiction for decades, even while dealing with serious health problems, and he died in London in 1889. Today he is still admired for the way he mixed page-turning entertainment with social criticism, and for the lasting influence of his mysteries on crime fiction that followed.