Nicholas Boulton

Wilkie Collins was the first great detective novelist. His dark and complex mysteries influenced the work of other writers, such as Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, with whom he developed a close personal friendship. Swinburne found his work worthy of serious criticism, and T. S. Eliot credits him even more than Poe with the invention of the modern detective novel and the popular thriller. Before such works as The Woman in White, The Moonstone,...

'I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing — not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.' In Clea, the concluding part of The Alexandria Quartet, Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle — on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal — and a clarity of purpose emerges as the story moves towards its cadence....