Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins wrote The Woman in White and The Moonstone, invented much of the machinery of the detective novel, and lived openly with two women and neither of them was his wife. He was a painter's son who trained for the law without practising, met Dickens in 1851 through amateur theatricals, and became his collaborator, travelling companion and closest literary friend - they wrote plays and Christmas numbers together, and Dickens serialised Collins in his own magazines. The Woman in White in 1859 was a sensation on a scale hard to convey: crowds queued for instalments, and there were Woman in White bonnets, waltzes and perfumes. The Moonstone in 1868 is the one T. S. Eliot called the first and greatest of English detective novels, and it establishes most of the furniture - the country-house theft, the sceptical professional detective, the red herrings, the multiple narrators each reporting only what they saw. That last device is his real innovation, and he used it because he had watched trials: the reader is a jury assembling testimony. He suffered from gout in the eyes and took laudanum daily in quantities that would have killed a naive user, and wrote much of The Moonstone under it. He lived with Caroline Graves for most of his adult life and simultaneously kept a household with Martha Rudd, who bore him three children; he refused to marry either, and provided for both in his will. He wrote No Name and Armadale in the same decade and both were serialised to large audiences. His brother Charles married Kate Dickens. He is buried at Kensal Green and the grave was neglected for a century before admirers restored it.

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