Blurbs for Wilkie Collins Mysteries

(Note: Books are listed alphabetically.)

Dead Secret, The (1857)

by Wilkie Collins

Dover Books (1979)

Cover price: $9.95

'Dickens and Trollope admired and learned from Collins's complex mysteries; T. S. Eliot and Swinburne found them worthy of serious criticism; the modern detective and popular thriller remain in Collins's debt. The author of The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Armadale, and No Name, the brilliant exponent of labyrinthine plot and dramatic suspense, the first great "detective" novelist, first displayed the full range of his talent in The Dead Secret (1857), one of his earliest and rarest novels.

'The Dead Secret was Collins's first full-length puzzle-romance. Here he broke away from his youthful style to experiment with and refine those techniques of plot construction and surging narrative which he was to employ the next decade in his famous novels.

'The Dead Secret, as with Collins's later works, centers around a socially and morally questionable event, from which all incidents derive, and towards which all characters inevitably move. The secret, identified with the Cornish mansion Porthgenna, has all but ruined the life of the young servant girl Sarah Leeson; 15 years later it comes back to confuse and haunt Rosamond, the heir to Porthgenna. Collins's talent for eccentric characters is given full scope in the misanthropic hermit Andrew Treverton, his bullying servant Schrowl, and the actress whose powerful will lies behind the secret. The Dead Secret is a relentless quest to uncover a forgotten crime; the heir's detective work must finally lead to a disastrous revelation.

'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 since the beginning of the century; this 1873 edition includes 5 illustrations by E. A. Abbey. The Victorian fiction revival continues with this unusual Collins novel, available only from Dover.'