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. The author of The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Armadale, and No Name and a brilliant exponent of labyrinthine plots and dramatic suspense, Collins first displayed the full range of his talent in The Dead Secret (1857), one of his earliest and rarest novels.
The Dead Secret tells of a relentless quest to uncover a forgotten crime. From that one event, all of the novel's incidents derive, and, all of its characters inevitably move toward its resolution. The secret took place at the Cornish mansion Porthgenna and has all but ruined the life of the young servant girl Sarah Leeson. Fifteen years later, it comes back to confuse and haunt Rosamond, the heir to Porthgenna, who is driven to expose the truth. Collins's delightfully eccentric characters in this puzzle-romance include the misanthropic hermit Andrew Treverton, his bullying servant Schrowl, and the actress whose powerful will lies behind the secret.
Of Wilkie Collins's thirty-odd novels, The Dead Secret has, before now, been one of the most difficult to obtain. It has not been reprinted anywhere.
