Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist who, in two extraordinary books, established the shape of the modern suspense novel. Trained for the law and never practising, he met Dickens in 1851 and became his closest collaborator and rival. The Woman in White and The Moonstone are built from testimony: each witness tells the part they saw, and the reader assembles the truth from statements that do not quite agree. It is a technique borrowed from the courtroom, and it produced the first English detective novel, the first amateur sleuth of consequence, and a way of withholding information that every thriller since has used. He lived by his own arrangements, two households and neither of them a marriage, and wrote much of his later work through chronic pain and the laudanum he took for it.