Wilkie Collins is sometimes referred to as the ‘grandfather of English detective fiction’.

• A country house robbery
• An ‘inside job’
• A celebrated policeman with a touch of amiable eccentricity
• Bungling local constabulary
• Detective procedures
• False suspects
• ‘The least likely suspect’
• A rudimentary ‘locked room' murder
• A reconstruction of the crime
• A final twist in the plot

Wilkie Collins, according to Robert Ashley, can also claim the following:

• The first British detective story (‘A Stolen Letter’, 1854)
• The first appearance of a police officer (‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, 1852)
• The first woman detective (‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, 1856)
• The first humorous detective story (‘The Biter Bit’, 1858)
• The first canine detective (‘My Lady’s Money’, 1877)

Collins also influenced Conan Doyle whose Sherlock Holmes emulates many of the features of both Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone and the pipe-smoking Old Sharon in ‘My Lady’s Money’. The ‘three-pipe problem’ of The Sign of Four was anticipated by Uncle Joseph’s ‘I smoke three pipes and think three thoughts’ in The Dead Secret (1857). The Holmes dictum from ‘The Red-Headed League’ that ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth sounds remarkably like Felix Sweetsir’s ‘exhaustive system of reasoning’ from ‘My Lady’s Money’.