Have you read ... Wilkie Collins?

    Born on this day in 1824, William Wilkie Collins is best known for his novels The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, all published in the 1860s. The Moonstone is regarded as the first detective story in English, while The Woman in White, his 'must read text', began the vogue for 'sensation' fiction which "peered beneath the surface gentility of Victorian domesticity and revealed a world of bigamy, madness, murder and violence supposedly lurking there," (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide).

    "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait", is the serialist's motto, attributed to Collins (according to John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives), and he did all that and more, becoming a great popular success in the process, and in Dickens' view, writing one of the two best scenes in English fiction with the opening of The Woman in White.

    The Moonstone has been nominated as a book for the beach, "its unhurried episodes perfectly paced for stints on the sand," while readers here put Collins in the 'fireside reading' category.

    Have you read him, and if so, which book would you especially recommend?