Wilkie Collins

Ancient Rome, AD 408: Young Antonia had the misfortune to live in interesting times -- the days when mighty Rome was brought low by the terror of the Goths.

Armadale (1866) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-epistolary novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them.The novel has a convoluted plot about two distant cousins both named Allan Armadale. The father of one had murdered the father of the other (the two fathers are also named Allan Armadale). The story starts with a deathbed confession by the murderer in the form of a letter to be given to his baby son when he grows up. Many years are skipped over. The son, mistreated at home, runs away from his mother and stepfather, and takes up a wandering life under the assumed name of Ozias Midwinter. He becomes a companion to the other Allan Armadale, who throughout the novel never discovers the relationship. But Ozias is constantly haunted by feeling that he might harm Allan, first after he reads the letter left for him, and then again after they spend the night on a shipwreck off the Isle of Man--the ship turning out to be the same on which the old murder took place (the murderer locked his victim in a cabin as the boat filled with water). On the boat, Allan has a mysterious dream involving three characters. This dream fills Ozias with foreboding, its three scenes becoming fulfilled in the course of the novel.

No Name (1862) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century novel revolving around the issue of illegitimacy.The story begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somersetshire, the country residence of the happy Vanstone family. When Andrew Vanstone is killed suddenly in an accident and his wife follows shortly thereafter, it is revealed that they were not married at the time of their daughters' births, making their daughters "Nobody's Children" in the eyes of English law and robbing them of their inheritance.

A high ranking Catholic priest schemes to recover land considered Church property.

Valeria Woodville's first act as a married woman is to sign her name in the marriage register incorrectly, and this slip is followed by the gradual disclosure of a series of secrets about her husband's earlier life, each of which leads on to another set of questions and enigmas. Her discoveries prompt her to defy her husband's authority, to take the law into into a labyrinthine maze of false clues and deceptive identities, in which the exploration of the tangled workings of the mind becomes linked to an investigation into the masquerades of femininity. Probably the first full-length novel with a woman detective as its heroine, The Law and the Lady is a fascinating example of Collins's later fiction. First published in 1875, it employs many of the techniques used in The Moonstone, developing them in bizarre and unexpected ways, and in its Gothic and fantastic elements The Law and the Lady adds a significant dimension to the history of detective fiction.

Widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels, The Moonstone tells of the events surrounding the disappearance of a mysterious (and cursed) yellow diamond. T. S. Eliot called it 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. It contains a number of ideas which became common tropes of the genre, including a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed, and two police officers who exemplify respectively the 'Scotland Yard bungler' and the skilled, professional detective.

A tale of criminality, almost revolting from its domestic horrors.

When a condemned woman asks the local Minister to take her daughter home, the childless man is touched and finds himself unable to refuse. Yet the prisoner is unrepentant of the murder of her husband. Will her vices be passed on to this seemingly sweet child?

The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, serialized in 1859–1860, and first published in book form in 1860. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first (and finest) in the genre of 'sensation novels'.As was customary at that time, The Woman in White was first published as a magazine serial. The first episode appeared on 29 November 1859, following Charles Dickens's own A Tale of Two Cities in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round in England, and Harper's Magazine in America. It caused an immediate sensation. Julian Symons (in his 1974 introduction to the Penguin edition) reports that "queues formed outside the offices to buy the next instalment. Bonnets, perfumes, waltzes and quadrilles were called by the book's title. Gladstone cancelled a theatre engagement to go on reading it. And Prince Albert sent a copy to Baron Stockmar."(from Wikipedia)

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, Rutherford College, University of Kent The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night, the stone is stolen. Suspicion then falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself. The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of the missing stone is ingeniously solved.

Collins gyönyörű regénye két szerelmesről, akiket a végzet egymásnak rendelt. Vajon elszakíthatják-e őket a körülmények egymástól?

Napínavý příběh z viktoriánské Anglie.

"The Dream Woman" is a novella by Wilkie Collins, telling the story of Francis Raven, a young man who dreams that a strange woman is trying to kill him. Eventually, he marries a woman who looks exactly like the one from his dream. This novella is a cosy mystery that leaves readers with more questions than answers.

"The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins is one of the forefathers of detective fiction, cementing the foundations of the genre. At the centre of it lays the theft of a diamond, dating in origin from a religious Indian shrine, which prompts detective Sergeant Cuff to take up the case. It is an absolute page-turner of a story and goes through the accounts of the different characters, winding and meandering from fact to fiction and vice versa.

When Lord Montbarry dies suddenly in his Venice palace, and his courier goes missing, suspicion is instantly thrown on his new wife, the beautiful Countess Narona, who has collected his life insurance and fled to America. Montbarry’s former fiance´ Agnes, still harbouring feelings for him, and Henry Westwick, Montbarry’s younger brother, decide to investigate this tragedy and head for the palace, now a hotel.