<b>A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of<i>The Moonstone</i> and <i>The Woman in White</i>, two early masterpieces of mystery and detection.</b><br><br>Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely near-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women—and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, &quot;the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists,&quot; from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his lifelong friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as his enduring masterpieces,<i>The Moonstone</i>—often called the first true detective novel—and the sensational<i>The Woman in White</i>, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. Told with Ackroyd's inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humor and sympathetic understanding.