Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

Dickens (1812–1870) and Collins (1824–1889) were friends, collaborators and travelling companions for fifteen years, and Collins's brother married Dickens's daughter. They wrote No Thoroughfare together for the 1867 Christmas number of All the Year Round, then adapted it for the stage while Dickens was touring America — one man the age's greatest novelist, the other the inventor of the English detective novel, working in the same room.