Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), associate of Charles Dickens and author of 15 novels, is perhaps best remembered for his great mystery novel The Moonstone. But Collins also wrote several short stories, tales of terror and the supernatural, which many consider comparable to those of Poe and J. Sheridan LeFanu. This new edition contains twelve of Collins' most masterful horror tales - The Dream Woman, A Terribly Strange Bed, The Dead Hand, Fauntleroy, Blow Up with the Brig!, A Stolen Letter, The Lady of Glenwith Grange, Mr Policeman and the Cook, Me Lepel and the Housekeeper, Miss Bertha and the Yankee, Mad Monkton and The Biter Bit. Herbert van Thal, the noted authority on Victorian literature, has made the selection, and has also contributed a new introduction summarizing Collins' life and briefly evaluating his career. These tales are not easily forgotten; they feature unusually imaginative situations, couple with vivid descriptions and surprising plots, Collins' ventures into the shadowy realms of the half-dead, and his explorations of subtle, morbid psychology, strange diseases and uncanny coincidences are every bit as fascinating and terrifying as those of Poe. Also like Poe, he was an excellent craftsman, able to carry the suspense to the very end by keeping the mystery shrouded until the final page. Although a few of these stories have been anthologized, most of them are now extremely hard to find. With this reprinting, they will once again be available both to lovers of supernatural fiction and to those who enjoy perfection in the art of storytelling. As G.K. Chesterton put it: Wilkie Collins is the one man of unmistakeable genius who has an affinity with Dickens:... there were no two men who could touch them at a ghost story.
Author
A close friend of Charles Dickens from their meeting in March 1851 until Dickens' death in June 1870, William Wilkie Collins was one of the best known, best loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers. But after his death, his reputation declined as Dickens' bloomed. Now, Collins is being given more critical and popular attention than he has received for 50 years. Most of his books are in print, and all are now in e-text. He is studied widely; new film, television, and radio versions of some of his books have been made; and all of his letters have been published. However, there is still much to be discovered about this superstar of Victorian fiction. Born in Marylebone, London in 1824, Collins' family enrolled him at the Maida Hill Academy in 1835, but then took him to France and Italy with them between 1836 and 1838. Returning to England, Collins attended Cole's boarding school, and completed his education in 1841, after which he was apprenticed to the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. in the Strand. In 1846, Collins became a law student at Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1851, although he never practised. It was in 1848, a year after the death of his father, that he published his first book, 'The Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A'., to good reviews. The 1860s saw Collins' creative high-point, and it was during this decade that he achieved fame and critical acclaim, with his four major novels, 'The Woman in White' (1860), 'No Name' (1862), 'Armadale' (1866) and 'The Moonstone' (1868). 'The Moonstone', is seen by many as the first true detective novel T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels ..." in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe.
