Author of such feats of storytelling as "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone," Wilkie Collins has traditionally been recognized far more than for his accomplishments as a serious novelist. In this study of "The Moonstone," Peter Thoms argues for a new appreciation of this early master of detection and intrigue. Plotting in Collins, Thoms contends, represents much more than the skillful carpentry of the novelist: It constitutes the essential drama of the major novels themselves, as protagonists struggle for control of the stories in which they find themselves embedded. Mr. Thoms...
Author of such feats of storytelling as "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone," Wilkie Collins has traditionally been recognized far more than for h...
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past...
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms a...
