This is a collection of shorter pieces by Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. I recently read his early novella A Rogue’s Life. These stories are for the most part from the same era as that novella. The lead story here is “The Dead Hand” and at first I thought it was going to be a kind of cheap thrill of a story. A man goes to a hotel off the main road and is offered a solid, if suspicious, […]
Taking leave of my publisher, I went to consult an artist friend on my future prospects.
(http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_rogue.htm) This is an 1856 novella written by Wilkie Collins and published serially. The novel spends several years with Frank Softly, the titular rogue and someone from a middle-class, more or less well-to-do family, who goes from being a political cartoonist to a would-be artist to a would-be scam artist plying his artistic trade in numerous ways including producing fakes of masterpieces and counterfeiting money. This book is relatively short and you can feel within the writing that it’s being serialized because chapters to tend […]
473 pages = overly wordy review
I have found some fun stuff while being a volunteer shelver at my library. The Moonstone was on the cart to put back, but after reading the blurb that said it was one of the first mysteries (written in 1868), I had to check it out myself. The first hurdle is the entire setup of the story. We’re supposed to root for the protagonists simply because they’re the protagonists, but if it weren’t for a heaping helping of racism, none of it would have happened. […]
The Subjective and the Objective
I inadvertently picked up three novels that have a lot to say about authorship, narration, and the nature of reality as pertains to stories and storytelling. This novel is a small mystery (but a 500 page novel) about a maybe cursed diamond that was (definitely first stolen from an Indian village in British colonial India in the 1840s and then) maybe stolen from its “rightful” heir, Rachel, who was passed down the Moonstone by a hated and derided uncle who either was trying to win […]