The Guilty River and the Ghost’s Touch

Wilkie Collins passed up a legal career to establish detective fiction as a genre, writing such acknowledged masterpieces of suspense as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Collins first published his work in Charles Dickens's magazine, Household Words; the two authors were friends and mutual advisors through much of Collins's early career. Collins enjoyed forty years of productivity, but suffered from the gout and an addiction to painkillers in his later years.