Author: Wilkie Collins

Collins wrote The Woman in White for Dickens's magazine and then The Moonstone, which is usually called the first English detective novel and gave the form Sergeant Cuff, the country-house theft and the unreliable multiple narration. He was in constant pain from a rheumatic illness and took laudanum in quantities that astonished his friends; he said parts of The Moonstone were written in a state he could not remember afterwards and that he did not recognise the text. He never married, kept two households, Caroline Graves in one and Martha Rudd and their three children in the other, and made little effort to conceal either. Man and Wife and No Name are angry books about what English law did to married and illegitimate women. He died in 1889.