The complete online text of The Evil Genius by Wilkie Collins.

The English author William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) wrote intricately plotted novels of sensational intrigue which helped establish the conventions of modern detective fiction. Wilkie Collins was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, the son of a successful...

"Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait." This adage of Wilkie Collins epitomizes his success as the leading sensation novelist of Victorian England. Combining expert plotting with carefully described settings, Collins's novels define the excitement...

Although best known to modern readers as the author of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—which T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers have called the best English detective story—Wilkie Collins made contributions more substantial tha...

Richard Dyer's perceptive review of the Bel Canto Society's video of "Great Conductors of the Third Reich: Art in the Service of Evil" (Living/Arts, July 25) opens up the opportunity for a broader discussion regarding intellectuals and why so many despicable genuises emerged in...

Mao: A Life, by Philip Short (Holt, 782 pp., $37.50) Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence (Viking, 188 pp., $19.95) OF last century's evil geniuses-Hitler, Stalin, and Mao-Mao has the best claim to genius tout court. He united a China long thought...

Spike Lee’s Inside Man, from a screenplay by Russell Gewirtz, has been so exhaustively excoriated by my esteemed colleague, Rex Reed, in this paper two weeks ago that I hesitated at first to bring up the subject at all at this late date. For one...

Spike Lee’s Inside Man, from a screenplay by Russell Gewirtz, has been so exhaustively excoriated by my esteemed colleague, Rex Reed, in this paper two weeks ago that I hesitated at first to bring up the subject at all at this late date. For...