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“... taken in conjunction with the club’s ‘few first editions of Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins’, is enough to invoke, by conditioned reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger ...”

“... outdated heroism of Franklin’s men, celebrated in that very Victorian melodrama by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, has no counterpart in the new world of Toronto, falling apart with Aids and the insidious toxins of waste dumps, ‘concealed here and there in the countryside, and masked by the lush deceitful green of waving trees’. ‘Franklin my dear, I ...”

“... gout to windy gout, from recurrent, retrocedent, irregular and suppressed gout to imaginary gout. Wilkie Collins claimed to have gout in the eyes, curing himself of gout in other places by visits to European spas. Tennyson’s gout covered a wealth of debilitations and was not helped by heavy drinking. It was also possible to be ‘gouty without having ...”

“... modest phrase. The unmistakable Hardy is present, even among the near-absurdities of the Wilkie Collins plot – as he is present in different fashions throughout the minor works. Present in moods of lesser tension that are worth recalling as a real part of Hardy’s achievement. This is thoughtful criticism exercised on a subject that was well ...”

“... When he found himself on his deathbed with half his last novel, Blind Love, still to write, Wilkie Collins sent the plans to Walter Besant, who was politely asked in a spirit of authorial comradeship to finish the work. ‘Tell him I would do as much for him if he were in my place,’ Collins said. So full and ...”

“... Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood (I think) and to Wilkie Collins. The effect is like an unseen examination for Joint Honours in English Art and Literature, except that while Ackroyd trusts the ‘scholarly reader’ to recognise the literary gobbets, he slips him a crib to the slide-test. There are no doubt ...”

“... circumstances. Persistent scepticism and a spirit of hard-headed enquiry is always needed. Like Wilkie Collins or Mary Braddon, Ellen Wood makes detectives of her readers. East Lynne is not precisely a ‘bigamy novel’. Archibald Carlyle has divorced Isabel, and believes her dead, before his remarriage. But the dramatic situation in the novel’s ...”

“... if magnificently, another Dickens novel or a true mystery in the genre classically established by Wilkie Collins with The Moonstone, which Dickens had published two years earlier in All the Year Round?Either answer points to considerable complexity of plot in the second half. Forster’s recollection that the story was to concern ‘the murder of a ...”

“... Kavan’s ability to lead an orderly life and to write so productively and consistently recall Wilkie Collins or George Crabbe, the latter like Kavan an addict for forty years. Kavan was a dedicated writer but she believed that her will to write – rather, her will to live – came from the heroin which protected her from a menacing world. This ...”

“... is conjured up as the wicked Count Fosco of St John’s Wood. The travesty was probably relayed to Wilkie Collins by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose exiled father had met Foscolo once and did not get on with him at all. By the spring of 1824, with Floriana’s inheritance spent and the tradesmen-creditors massing, Digamma had to be abandoned. After that ...”

“... their range of imaginative power. Perhaps the more apposite analogy for him is with a writer like Wilkie Collins, whose talents are now properly recognised. Simenon made no bones about writing for money or aiming for popular success. This made for a high degree of repetition, a certain homogeneity of themes and writing methods. This may be deemed a real ...”

“... Life’. There is no necessary discrepancy between the Trollope of the letters and the man of whom Wilkie Collins said: ‘He was an incarnate gale of wind. He blew off my hat; he turned my umbrella inside out.’ The bluster and vulgarity with which he was sometimes taxed do not appear in the letters. On the other hand, he never kicks up his heels as ...”

“... of the new sexual type had in fact taken place forty years earlier when, in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins offset his pretty, insipid, helpless heroine by a second heroine who was none of these things: the great Marian Halcombe, whose charm subdued not only the equally great Count Fosco in the book but also such men of the readership as Swinburne ...”

“... 13 September 1856 the leading contribution was an anonymous article written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins and entitled ‘To think, or be thought for’. The pretext for the piece was a controversy in the correspondence columns of the Times concerning a picture by ‘the old Venetian painter Bellini’ recently acquired for the National ...”

“... a far more haunting version – slight as it may be – of the prototype tales in Poe and Wilkie Collins. On the other hand, too ponderous a reliance on the procession of the factual can be a nemesis for Conrad’s method, as it is in the leaden apotheosis of Nostromo, the fatalistic adventure-epic of Patusan in Lord Jim, and the excessively ...”