WHILE IT IS TRUE that Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, and even wrote the first locked-room mystery, no one played a greater role in making this literary genre popular than (William) Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), a friend of and frequent collaborator with Charles Dickens and author of two of the greatest novels in the history of mystery fiction, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). The inventor of what became known as the “sensation” novel and one of the most popular and highest paid of all Victorian novelists, he was born in London, the son of the very successful landscape painter William Collins, a member of the Royal Academy. Collins received a law degree but never practiced, deciding to become a full-time writer instead. Over the course of his life, he published twenty-five novels, fifteen plays, more than fifty short stories, and more than one hundred nonfiction articles. He met Dickens in 1851 and soon co-wrote a play with him, The Frozen Deep, then collaborated with him on short stories, articles, and numerous other projects. When Dickens founded a magazine, All the Year Round, in 1859, Collins assured its success by serializing The Woman in White in its pages. He later wrote Christmas stories for the periodical, serialized the long novel No Name (1862) and, in 1867, the classic The Moonstone, which T. S. Eliot described as “the first, the longest, and the best” detective novel of all time. Collins adapted The Woman in White for the stage in 1871; it has been filmed frequently, beginning with a Pathe silent in 1917 but most memorably in 1948 with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker, Gig Young, and Sydney Greenstreet as the evil Count Fosco. The Moonstone was also dramatized by Collins, opening in 1877; it has been filmed at least five times, first as a 1909 silent, followed by a 1915 silent, then as a lackluster 1934 low-budget film, as a garrulous five-part BBC production in 1972, and again as a BBC production in 1997.
“A Terribly Strange Bed” was first published in the April 24, 1852, issue of Household Words; it was first collected in After Dark (London, Smith, 1856).