Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkic Collins looked distinerly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers.
Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his lifelong friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone- often called the first true decctive novel - and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser-known works.
Told with Ackroyd's inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.