The English author William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) wrote intricately plotted novels of sensational intrigue which helped establish the conventions of modern detective fiction.

Wilkie Collins was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, the son of a successful painter. Leaving school in his sixteenth year, he was apprenticed to a tea importer but had little enthusiasm for business. As a young man, he both wrote and painted. He published a number of articles and stories, exhibited a picture at the Royal Academy, and was an early supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His first published novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850), was modeled on the historical fiction of the popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Collins met Charles Dickens in 1851 and became one of his closest friends. Most of his early stories and novels appeared in Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and through participation in Dickens's elaborate amateur theatricals...