Wilkie Collins
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HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.' One of the earliest works of 'detective' fiction with a narrative woven together from multiple characters, Wilkie Collins partly based his infamous novel on a real-life eighteenth century case...
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Considered the first true detective story Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. Originally serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round, it introduced many hallmarks of detective fiction, including an English country house setting, bungling local policemen, and a large number of false suspects. In it, Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday...
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Scion of a well-connected but impoverished family, Frank Softly may be the most audacious, outrageous, engaging, and thoroughly love-struck young man in Regency London. By the age of 25, he's been in and out of doctoring, caricaturing, forging Old Masters, and counterfeiting half-crowns. Now a maliciously conceived will ties the loveable rascal's fortunes to those of his doddering grandmother and miserly brother-in-law. The ensuing scheme brings Frank...
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This early work by Wilkie Collins was originally published in 1876. 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...
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The mysterious death of an English lord in Venice haunts the living in this nineteenth-century gothic novel by the author of The Woman in White.
Agnes Lockwood was devastated when her fiancé, Lord Montbarry, broke off their engagement to marry Countess Narona. But she was even more devastated to learn of Montbarry's death in Venice not long thereafter. A rundown palazzo would not only be the last stop on the newlyweds' continental tour, but also...
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The Yellow Mask (1887) is a novel by Wilkie Collins. Written toward the end of his life, The Yellow Mask recaptures some of the author's trademark sense of mystery and psychological unease that made him a household name around the world. Recognized as an important Victorian novelist and pioneer of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins was a writer with a gift for thoughtful entertainment, stories written for a popular audience that continue to resonate...
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A fascinating short story by the renowned author of The Woman in White, Captain Stanwick and Lionel Varleigh are old friends, but after falling out over their attentions to Bertha Laroche, they fight an illegal duel in Herne Wood. Stanwick, wrongly convinced he has killed Varleigh, goes mad and attempts to kill himself with a razor … when his supposed victim returns like an apparition from the dead.
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William, the narrator and faithful servant to rich widow, Mrs. Norcross, tells the story of his mistress' unhappy second marriage to James Smith. A detective lawyer's clerk, Mr. Dark, both confirms Smith's bigamous remarriage and, following his disappearance, proves Mrs. Norcross and William innocent of murder. Dark also recovers jewelry stolen by the maidservant and establishes her guilt.
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Two tales from the golden age of supernatural fiction
The Haunted House at Latchford by Mrs. J. H. Riddell
Mrs. J. H. Riddell excelled at blending the realistic and supernatural elements in her stories. In Essex she found the right dreary setting for The Haunted House at Latchford, "where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies."
The...
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Assembled and edited by Julian Hawthorne and first published in 1909, the Modern English volume of The Lock and Key Library features sixteen classic mystery and detective stories by such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Wilkie Collins.
Detective stories existed for centuries before the concept of the detective itself-amateur or professional- was fully formulated, and tales of mystery and intrigue...