Review of The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins

A decaying manor-house holds a secret that will ruin its new owners lives. Or not. Only plodding through to the novel's end will reveal the truth. 

Chosen because: I'm a big fan of his other (better) work

It's a bit difficult to review The Dead Secret, just because it is so dull. I'm a big fan of Wilkie Collins, or at least his best known novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White (see my previous review), but The Dead Secret had me yawning and flipping over the pages to reach the inevitable, tedious, ending.

For those of you who haven't come across Collins before, he is a Victorian writer and close friend of Charles Dickens, and one of the founding fathers of the detective story genre. The Moonstone is, in many ways, one of the first and the tricksiest of crime novels - with a twist in the tale long before anyone else had even thought that the genre might become overly predictable.

The Dead Secret is the predecessor to The Woman in White, and the most striking thing about it is how much Collins' writing improves from one novel to the next.

The story is set in a desolate Cornish manor house, and begins with a death-bed and the concealing of a sinister secret. Cut to twenty or so years later, and the secret is uncovered, mainly due to the efforts to conceal it.

The characters spend a great deal of time discussing exactly how they ought to go about finding the secret, which while no doubt realistic, is dull. There's only so much time you can spend reading about two people writing to another person to ask whether he has any ideas about finding out which room in a house is which.

Reviewers at the time criticised Collins' deliberate decision to reveal the secret to the reader at an early point, but I doubt whether concealing from us would have increased the suspense, mainly because it is such a damp squib when it is revealed to the characters. We're told that the secret could destroy a happy marriage, but the characters seem to shrug it off with an 'oh well, these things happen'. We're then told that, even more dramatically, it could lead to the wealthy couple having to curtail their expenditure for a while, and then they don't need to bother. Contrast this with the genuinely villainous plots of The Woman in White, and it's clear that at some point Collins realised that a suspense novel needs... well, a bit more suspense.
  
Having said that, it does have some good set piece moments, which look forward to Collins' later work - particularly the scenes in and around the mysterious 'Myrtle Room' which hides the secret.

Plus the characters are extremely dull. Sarah Leeson, a clear fore-runner to poor Anne Catherick in The Woman in White and Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone, is tediously rather than intriguingly disturbed. The supposedly charmingly sparky yet tender heroine is, in my opinion at least, irritating (but then so is Rachel in The Moonstone). And the noble blind husband is wet.

Of interest to literary scholars only. Or to people who want to reassure themselves that writing one duff novel does not mean that the next few won't be fantastic.