No Name, by Wilkie Collins :: Reading to Know Book Club

We've wrapped up March (Easter weekend prevented me from reading links but I plan on doing that this week!) and now it's on to April. Tim from Diary of an Autodidact is hosting this month's read and he selected No Name, by Wilkie Collins. I don't know about you, but I actually found the book a bit hard to find (as I didn't want to pay $12 for it). I ended up paying $10 but it was at a used book store and on trade. Hopefully your library has a copy - if you don't think you want to own it - but I'll go ahead and be gracious enough to mention that you can download this book free to your Kindle. (Yes. That is so.)

I've been looking forward to reading another Collins after having read The Woman in White (linked) back in 2011. So this is one of my most anticipated of the book club reads.

Tim kindly wrote up some of his thoughts in preparation for reading/discussing this book. They are as follows:

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Wilkie Collins (named William Wilkie after his father) was one of the most influential authors of the Victorian era, yet his name is often just a side note. He is known for The Woman in White and maybe The Moonstone, but little else. During his lifetime, his best known novels were classified as “sensation novels.” We now recognized them as early examples of detective and suspense fiction. Although Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first true detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which set the conventions of the genre that would eventually be associated primarily with Sherlock Holmes, it was Collins who expanded the form into the full length mystery. The Woman in White is his first effort, containing most of the usual elements; but it was The Moonstone that is the fully developed prototype of the genre. T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers (herself a master of the mystery) both gave high praise to The Moonstone.

No Name belongs to the other side of Collins’ writing: suspense fiction. There is no mystery to be solved - unless you count the mystery of what will happen next. The book begins a bit slowly, and appears to be a novel of domestic manners, perhaps in the vein of Jane Austen, or Anthony Trollope (one of my favorite authors); but it eventually goes completely off the tracks as tragedy strikes.

continue reading here

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Are you planning to read along with us this month? If so, let us know in the comments below!