Books with title The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright and short story writer best known for The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The last has been called the first modern English detective novel. Born to the family of a painter, William Collins, in London, he grew up in Italy and France, learning French and Italian. He began work as a clerk for a tea merchant. After his first novel, Antonina, appeared in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend and mentor. Some of Collins's works appeared first in Dickens's journals All the Year Round and Household Words and they collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins achieved financial stability and an international following with his best known works in the 1860s, but began suffering from gout. Taking opium for the pain grew into an addiction. In the 1870s and 1880s his writing quality declined with his health. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he split his time between Caroline Graves and his common-law wife Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children.

Wilkie COLLINS (1824-1889), elder son of the landscape painter William Collins. He was educated at private schools in London, but gained his real education on a two-year tour of Italy with his family (1836-38). He worked briefly for a tea importer and was later called to the bar, but never practised. His first book, a biography of his father, was published in 1848, and he later wrote numerous articles and short stories for Dickens´s periodicals “Household Words” and “All the Year Round” and for other journals, a book about a walking tour in Cornwall, and many moderately successful plays; but his reputation rests on his novels. His first was “Antonina” (1850), a historical novel about the fall of Rome; but with “Basil” (1852) he found his true metier as an expert in mystery, suspense, and crime. His finest work, the Novel of Sensation, was written in the 1860s, when he produced “The Woman in White” (1860), “No Name” (1862), “Armadale” (1866), and “The Moonstone” (1868). Collins wrote the first full-length detective stories in English, and set a mould for the genre which has lasted for a century. He excelled at constructing ingenious and meticulous plots, and made interesting experiments in narrative technique.