Spoiler Alert: Wilkie Collins, Saved by Dickens, Invents Mystery Novel

Watch any good mystery shows lately? They’re certainly not in short supply. Many viewers are still smarting from the second season of “True Detective.” (It got a bad rap, it wasn’t nearly as self-important as the first.) There’s also “Broadchurch,” the British series, on Netflix. And then there’s a new mystery show based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who invented Sherlock Holmes.

To the point: This stuff might not exist if not for Wilkie Collins, the subject of a new biography from Peter Ackroyd, who has also written books about T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, and William Blake. Collins, who in 1859 wrote what many consider to be the first true detective novel, The Woman in White, was a known influence on Conan Doyle’s detective stories.

Collins had been writing The Woman in White in serial form for the magazine All Year Round, published by his close friend Charles Dickens. Collins was an independent, almost eccentric, character and a unique writer who reaped benefits from Dickens’ endorsement. When the book was finally published as a standalone novel, it sold out on publication day, and five more editions were printed in two months.

It was a new kind of book, and Collins felt compelled to urge critics not to spoil the ending. Keep in mind: This was about one and a half centuries before we began preceding plot revelations with spoiler alerts. The critic for The Times laughed off Collins’s suggestion not to let the cat out of the bag because “there are in this novel about a hundred cats contained in a hundred bags, all screaming and mewing to be let out.” That opinion reflected the book’s greater critical reception, writes Ackroyd, but fortunately had no impact on its commercial success.

This new biography serves Collins by reaching beyond his chief legacy as the father of a particular genre. Ackroyd portrays a small, affable bon vivant with a disproportionately big head who loved travel and women and had no qualms about openly seeking public praise (and dollars) over the admiration of critics. Considered in the context of Collins’s life and times, the invention of the mystery novel seems less like the origin of a huge portion of the entertainment industry, and more like an unorthodox, peculiar product of a singular personality.