Wilkie Collins
(1824 - 1889)

"Laudanum - divine laudanum - was his only friend"

Wilkie Collins had a prodigious opium habit. He is famous for writing one of the first detective-novels in British fiction, The Moonstone (1868). Opium is central to the plot. The moonstone of the title is a sacred Hindu diamond "‘growing and lessening in lustre with the waxing and waning of the moon". The gem is stolen by a laudanum-intoxicated thief who later remembers nothing of the crime.


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