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William Wilkie Collins is often called the first detective novelist, and is also known as the inventor of the “sensation novel”. Certainly, he wrote two of the greatest detective novels, which combine classic mystery with a psychological strangeness and a sense of the sinister. Both The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) are full of doppelgängers, drug-induced hallucinations, tormented and physically abnormal characters, nightmares and waking dreams, sleep-walkers and sinister strangers, ghostly portents and moonlit midnight encounters.

He also wrote with insight and sympathy about fallen women and outsiders. Collins's own life was controversial and, in the end, unhappy. Though he was born into a secure family (his father was a celebrated landscape painter and his mother the daughter of an artist), he was an unhealthy boy: small, with a misshapen skull. He studied law but never practised it, devoting himself instead to his writing.

For 30 years, he lived with the widow Caroline Graves (during this period she married someone else then returned to Collins); at the same time, he also shared his house and bed with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children. For the last two decades of his life he was addicted to opium, which gave him paranoid delusions; one of them that he was accompanied by a “subjective doppelgänger” whom he called “Ghost Wilkie”.

Both his masterpieces have intricate structures. The Woman in White is really an epistolary novel, but one that is narrated by different characters in turn. This creates a shifting sense of reality and uncertainty; identities are stolen, or slip; nothing and nobody is quite what it seems. The Moonstone uses the same technique of interchanging and unreliable narrators and sensational elements: a huge diamond, a cast including Indian jugglers, a laudanum-taking physician's assistant.

One to read: The Moonstone (1868)

Nicci French is the pseudonym of married journalists, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. They have written ten psychological crime thrillers together, including the bestseller Killing Me Softly. The latest, Until it's Over, was published last month. Both live in Suffolk and continue to work and write separately. Gerrard's latest novel The Moment You Were Gone was published last year.

The Wilkie Collins Pages

The Moonstone: electronic text

Andrew Taylor on Wilkie Collins

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