by Wilkie Collins

A woman dies in childbirth, leaving a mysterious letter for her husband in the hands of her maid. The first part of the story established a mystery; what was in the letter? Why is the maid reluctant to give it to the husband as instructed? I found myself quickly caught up and really wondering what the secret was all about and whether it had anything to do with the newborn child.

In part two, we skip ahead fifteen years and like many Victorian novels, it's like starting the story over with all different characters. It took me a couple of chapters to get into this new phase of the tale. There is a lot of dialogue and situations that seem unrelated to the mysterious opening, until suddenly at the end of a section a connection is made.

I seldom read Mystery stories because not knowing drives me up a wall, but this one grabbed me before I realized that's what it is. The book is separated into six sections and mystery upon mystery builds up, I want to know what's going on!

I did guess the nature of the mysterious letter before the end, but there were some surprising details that made it far more interesting than I had anticipated. As Victorian stories go, it was very much a thing of its time and even had outdated spellings on a few words. I would definitely recommend it to readers who enjoy that period or anyone who likes a Mystery.

Peter Ackroyd's name on a title page is a sure recommendation for me. I've read others in his "brief lives" series, and enjoyed them all. What struck me about this one is that (as opposed to Chaucer or Shakespeare) there is a lot known about his 19th-century subject and (as opposed to Poe, who died at 40), Collins had a relatively long and very productive life to cram into 200 pages or so.

It didn't feel crammed, although there wasn't room for the kind of literary analysis that one would expect in a longer, academic biography. I think Ackroyd successfully identified the major themes and traits of Collins' best-known novels, and made connections between all of the writing and the life where that connection is evident. I got a clear picture both of Collins the author and Collins the man, and a reasonably good sense of the major relationships in his life (including those with his two concurrent mistresses!) The strong and lengthy friendship with Dickens got fair play here, but I imagine there is much more detail in Ackroyd's very decidedly not brief biography of Dickens which is sitting on my "to be read" shelf.

As I am reading through Collins in a rather haphazard way, this little book provides very useful context and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.

This novella by Collins was first published in 1874 in the collection "The Frozen Deep and other stories" under the title "John Jago's Ghost; or The Dead Alive". Based on a real early 19th-century case, it is set in the US, and the solution to the mysterious disappearance/murder of John Jago is fairly easily discerned from the title. The narrator-protagonist is a youngish lawyer, on a foreign trip to cure his nervous complaint (well, so much for that), and he encounters no supernatural occurrences or Gothic contrivances, other than a couple of moonlit gardens. Instead, there is a steady buildup of characterization for four or five main players, including the aforementioned John Jago, as well as one of Collins' trademark Young Women Who Know Their Own Mind (this one demonstrates it in American idioms, though not too annoyingly).

There's a disappearance, the arrest of two overwhelmingly obvious suspects, several stages of trial (interestingly, we're taken through the whole rarely-described sequence of magistrate - Grand Jury - formal trial), a couple of confessions with coercion in question, a verdict, a newspaper advertisement and a coincidental discovery, all overlaid with a rather unnecessary romantic sub-plot that leaves us a little unsure whether the young lady in question really knows her own mind or not, so quickly does she change the object of her affections. But then, it's not a full-length novel.

A quick and easy read, and it has been republished (2005) as an interesting early fictionalization of a wrongful conviction in the US, along with a lot of contextual legal information on the same - that is not the edition I read.

If you read Collins because he tells a good story, this item will suit you fine; if you read him for his Gothic/supernatural/sensational aspects, don't be fooled by the title - there's next to nothing in that vein.

Given his own socially unconventional attitudes (he had a well-documented disdain for the institution of marriage), I think it's unlikely that the plot of this novel - ostensibly a cautionary tale about choosing the rascal over the upright man for a husband - was anything more than a convenient trope for the aging and ailing Collins. Whether that was also the case for the fellow-novelist, Walter Besant, who finished the novel from Collins' notes after the latter's 1889 death, I do not know.

My principal problem with this novel is not the young lady, Iris, who gives her heart away to the roguish Sir Harry, despite the constant supporting presence of the much more suitable (and very much enamoured) Hugh Mountjoy. My problem is that, as a rogue, Sir Harry's a vacillating weakling. Of course, in order to make him defensible as a love object for his heroine, Collins had to put him far more to the centre of the moral sliding scale than either the scheming murderer Dr. Vimpany or the rather faceless and nameless Irish rebels who go around assassinating (a) English landowners in Ireland and (b) people they conceive to have betrayed and insulted their cause. Sir Harry moves from ideological to financial crime with barely a hitch, but is unable to carry through with any particular villainy, even his own proposed fraud on a life insurance company after he goes to all the trouble of faking his own death. And one of the best moments in the novel, because it's not at all conventional, is that where Collins shows Sir Harry sitting vacillating in the presence of a medical murder, neither assisting nor interfering, and making it quite clear in the process that while that murder was always a likelihood, it had not been openly discussed with his confederate.

The break between Collins' writing and the part written by Besant is at the end of Chapter 48 (so noted in my copy), and is very noticeable. Besant doesn't seem to have made any effort to mimic Collins' fairly declarative style, and instead one immediately notices the much more broken sentences and heavy use of dashes. However, there is no floundering in moving the plot to its preordained conclusion; I just wish Besant had made a little more of the dramatic death of Doctor Vimpany in the flooding Solway Firth, a climax of the action that I vaguely feel must have been done before in 19th-century literature, possibly by Sir Walter Scott, as it was bringing up memories of a similar scene.

This is Collins at the very tail-end of his powers, and the story is incompletely realized, but I still found some interest in the proceedings. I also quite liked the three main women characters: Iris, Fanny (a fallen woman rescued by Iris, who thereafter became somewhat manically devoted to her), and Mrs. Vimpany, who was also reformed by Iris, though rather suddenly. The women, interestingly enough, are all capable of more character development than the men.

This novel came up fairly early in my reading of Collins because the title starts with the letter "B" and my collection is alphabetical. If you are reading Collins according to a more sensible plan (merit of the novels, or even chronology), you can safely leave this one to the end, but there's no need to omit it.

I found this story of a nerve-stricken man and his shattered marriage to be less entertaining than Collins' usual, mainly because it relies on an uncomfortable strain of anti-Catholicism - and associated mercenary motives - for its villain, Father Benwell, who is just about as stereotypical a Jesuit schemer as you could find in any of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic romances. Collins makes an attempt to introduce some supernatural or apparently supernatural occurrences into the mental/emotional breakdown of his protagonist, Romayne - aptly named, since he becomes an avid Catholic convert and priest, to the point of abandoning his pregnant wife Stella - but the haunting voices in the lonely old house aren't very enthusiastically portrayed, and Collins doesn't seem to be terribly interested in convincing us of either a plausible or a supernatural explanation for them. The associated story of the mentally ill younger brother of a victim of Romayne (in a duel) has possibilities, but we never really get to know him, nor to understand the massive coincidence of his being the unwitting transmitter of some important documents.

There are a couple of sympathetic characters, one being Stella, Romayne's wife, and the other a Jesuit enthusiast (but with a moral compass) named Penrose, who is packed off on some dangerous adventures in the New World. And, of course, there is one Winterfield, who is a noble but (while Romayne lives) hopeless alternate suitor for Stella, who wooed her under the impression his first wife was dead, was forced to leave Stella at the altar when that first wife resurfaced, and of course has the most terrible trouble re-establishing his claim thereafter. But, sympathetic or no, I just found myself a little bit detached from all of them, probably because they all seemed far too easily duped by Father Benwell and his endless lies and sophistries directed at retrieving Romayne's estate for the Church. There is, of course, a happy ending of sorts, brought about by a little boy throwing things in a fire (at his expiring Father's urging).

It wasn't bad, but Collins can do better than this.