When Wilkie Collins died in September 1889, critics and readers were agreed that his best work was long past. He was struck by gout in the 1860s, known otherwise as the period in which he produced his best works — The Woman in White, Armadale, No Name and The Moonstone — and his dependence on laudanum, taken for relief from pain, had grown since then. Besides, Dickens’s death in 1870 was a great loss to his creative life and, perhaps, as Swinburne pointed out cheekily, a sense of ‘mission’ overwhelmed Collins’s genius for ‘sensational’ fiction.
Whatever Victorian disapproval the label ‘sensational’ may have carried, Collins’s brilliance in creating thrilling mysteries out of everyday matters was undisputed. Henry James praised him for having brought the mystery novel home from Udolpho to the English manor house. Collins’s concern about social evils — The Woman in White captures the abuse of lunacy laws — and his insight into women’s minds, especially those considered ‘plain’ or ‘idiotic’, were woven into his mysteries, which also brought forth Gothic villains and shadowy, candle-lit Gothic scenes.
His understanding of injustice was far ahead of his times. The Moonstone, celebrated as the first detective novel in English, is remarkable for its penetrating critique of imperialism and racial prejudice. It also shows off Collins’s ability to control a narrative made up of first-person voices, each suited to the narrator’s character, class and limitations of understanding. But The Moonstone may not be the first detective story in English. Written in 1868, it comes more than two decades after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.
But Collins did give the world its first woman detective. In The Law and the Lady, the gently brought up Valeria decides to prove her husband’s innocence in the alleged murder of his first wife.
Published in 1875, the novel solves the biggest problem facing a writer trying to create a credible female detective in an age of repressive gender values: Collins gives his detective a motive. It is cannily done — love for and unshakeable faith in a husband were acceptable enough as guiding impulses. Valeria’s determination overcomes opposition from her husband, family and friends and overrides apparently insurmountable social barriers.
Soon after Collins, across the ‘pond’ in the 1890s, Anna Katharine Green of The Leavenworth Case fame would find ways to come up with not one but two women detectives in that age of proprieties. Her young Violet Strange leads a double life, but far more influential is the inquisitive spinster, Amelia Butterworth, foremother of Miss Marple. Her creator first opened her eyes on the world in September 1890.
