Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824. Very young he entered as an apprentice in a tea trading company, which he soon abandoned to devote himself to literature, a field in which he quickly achieved success. Considered one of the fathers of detective fiction, during his sixty-five years of life he wrote twenty-seven novels and more than fifty short stories. He was a close friend of Charles Dickens from the time they met in March 1851, when he began a fruitful collaboration. His mystery novels The Lady in White (1860) and the detective story The Moonstone (1868) are considered masterpieces in their respective genres.
Suffering from "rheumatoid gout", he became addicted to the severe consumption of laudanum. As a result of this addiction, he experienced paranoid hallucinations throughout his life; for example, he declared that he was constantly accompanied by a double of his, invisible to all others, whom he nicknamed "Wilkie the Ghost."
Collins never married, but lived, on and off, with widow Caroline Graves. In addition, he had three children with another woman, Martha Rudd. In 1870 he returned permanently to Mrs. Graves, and until her death in 1889 he maintained both relationships.