Collins, Wilkie (1824-1889), an English author, was one of the most successful writers of detective fiction in the 1800’s. The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) rank as his best and most popular novels.
Some critics rank The Moonstone among the world’s outstanding detective stories. Sergeant Cuff, a character in the novel, was one of the first detectives in English fiction. The book is about a diamond called the moonstone which is stolen from the forehead of an image of the moon god of India. A curse, and sometimes murder, follows the diamond until it is returned.
William Wilkie Collins was born on Jan. 8, 1824, in London. He became a lawyer in 1851 but never practiced law. However, he used his knowledge of law in writing his books. Collins gained his first literary success with Antonina (1850), a historical novel set in ancient Rome. In 1851, he met Charles Dickens and the two became close friends. Collins’s first important mystery novel, The Dead Secret (1857), appeared in Dickens’s magazine Household Words. He died on Sept. 23, 1889.
