Wilkie Collins

Collins was Dickens's close friend, sometime co-author, and fellow amateur actor, and the two collaborated on stage productions and magazine pieces for years. Chronic gout brought him agonizing pain that he treated with ever-increasing doses of laudanum, an addiction that eventually produced hallucinations, including, he claimed, a phantom double who sometimes tried to dictate his own writing to him.

He lived as unconventionally as he wrote, maintaining two separate households with two women, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, without marrying either. The Woman in White (1859) helped launch the 'sensation novel,' and The Moonstone (1868) is widely credited as the first great English detective novel, complete with a full battery of the genre's now-standard devices.

He died in London in 1889.