Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright, the son of the London painter William Collins, and he is best known for The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The second is often called one of the first modern detective novels and is among the earliest clear examples of the police procedural. Collins also wrote Basil and Armadale, and he worked closely with Charles Dickens, who became his friend and mentor. Opium he took for gout became an addiction, and his health declined in the 1870s and 1880s before he died in 1889.