I learned a lesson in my reading yesterday: always read an introduction from the author with care (inversely, intros by someone other than the author can always wait). I flitted through the intro to A Rogue’s Life by Wilkie Collins, focusing with glee on the lines “written at Paris, when I had Charles Dickens for a near neighbor and a daily companion” – what a perfect combo, Paris for a city and Dickens for a mate! –  and failing to comprehend that the pages to come were “imaginary Confessions“. That failure led me to waste the first forty pages of this book wondering when this beguiling, charming, rascally (“Rogue”) narrator would stop with the art and start with the writing.  And I was sure Collins’ father had been a painter, not a doctor….It was only when the love interest sparked that I finally realized I was reading fiction.  I know the ins and outs of Collins love life, as well as anyone could know the complicated connections between Collins, his live-in lover for years Mrs. Graves, the other woman Martha Rudd with whom he fathered three children, and the years he spent with one or the other, or both.  The woman in A Rogue’s Life is one of the archetypical women from his novels, and not from his life.

From that point on, I loved A Rogue’s Life but I am a Collins’ fan, addict, and adulator: the only book of his I ever did not like was his very first, Iolani (not published until 150 years after he wrote it and it probably never should have been at all).  A Rogue’s Life is a short version of his usual combination of lively action, repeated coincidence, lurking mystery, shaded evil, incipient fraud, complicated inheritance, dogged pursuit by the law, and resolution of all the above issues through love, death, and change of scene (in this case, transportation to the Antipodes).

For Collins’ fans, A Rogue’s Life will be a familiar and fun read; for those new to the cult, start with The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Armadale, The Haunted Hotel, The Dead Secret, and Blind Love.  Maybe next year I should read (and reread) a Collins a week….It would be a pleasurable year, for sure.