Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and close friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens. The son of landscape painter William Collins, Wilkie trained in law at Lincoln's Inn before dedicating his life to narrative suspense, pioneering the Victorian 'sensation novel' genre characterized by secret identities, forgery, bigamy, and psychological crime.

Collins's masterpiece The Woman in White (1859) revolutionized serialized fiction with its multi-perspective narration and brilliant villain Count Fosco. In The Moonstone (1868), recounting the theft of a sacred Indian diamond, Collins established the classic conventions of detective fiction—including Sergeant Cuff, red herrings, crime scene reconstruction, and locked-room logic—leading T.S. Eliot to declare it 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'.