Published serially from 1859-60, this book is considered the first mystery novel and the best representative of the sensational novel genre. A disciple of and collaborator with Charles Dickens, Collins knew how to please the readers just as well as his mentor could. Despite its status as sensational, its sensation does not rely on temporal and chronological displacement (ie, Radcliffe’s tendency to place her narratives in the past and in foreign places), Collins manages to manufacture fear and terror based on the realities of mid-Victorian Britain: the ability of a husband to commit his wife into an asylum without any independent evidence, the horrifying conditions of those in asylums, the loss of a woman’s property to her husband, the stigma placed on bastards, and the real danger of mortal illness. Sir Percival’s evil plan is plotted not only to secure his wife’s property, but also his secret: that his parents were not married, making him a bastard rather than a titled baronet. The novel’s multiple viewpoints mimic his strategy in The Moonstone and the strategy of Dickens’ Bleak House and Stoker’s Dracula. The fabulous, wily, and unprincipled Count Fosco is just as wonderful and alluring a character as Falstaff.