“Mr. Ackroyd is a consummate literary critic, and he neatly weaves analysis of Collins’ works into the chronology of his life…Compulsive reading.”

“Ackroyd shows in his study…a Victorian writer who was a major creator of the detective novel…Ackroyd is himself a prodigious writer of biography, history, and fiction. He’s clearly at home in Victorian England and has an obvious affection for his subject. The gift of his book is to take Collins out of Dickens’ shadow.”

“A highly readable introduction to a marvelous and still underrated writer.”

“A perfect little biography.”

“All of it, though firmly rooted in time and place, adds up to a universally salient and timely story of love against all odds.”

“This compact but detailed biography illuminates…one of the Victorian era’s most popular authors…[who] flouted Victorian mores and sometimes incensed critics with his realistic depictions of working-class life and the plight of women. The depiction of Collins as an artist afflicted with gout and neuralgia who worked himself to the brink of nervous prostration with each book he wrote makes him as interesting as one of his own fictional characters. Ackroyd’s appraisal of his subject—that ‘he breathed upon facts and kindled them into life’—is applicable to his own achievement here.”

“Ackroyd, a prolific writer acclaimed for his histories of London and the Thames, adds a new author to his oeuvre of great lives concisely chronicled…Ackroyd’s approachable narrative and the book’s near-pocket size will appeal to Collins fans.”

“A compact, pithy, and generous biography of a novelist who found great success despite writing in the age of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope.”