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"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, attraction, and fascination with sensation fiction which had such a great impact on the reading public of the 1860s. Uniting a background in art with a legal education and a love of drama, Collins fashioned novels of immense popularity that resulted in his prominence as a literary celebrity. His estimated income of over £10,000 for 1862-1863 established a record for the highest yearly income of any writer of the nineteenth century, according to his most recent biographer. But more importantly, his development of the English detective novel initiated a tradition of extraordinary and continued appeal. His two classic examples of suspense and detection, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), remain outstanding models of English crime fiction.
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