5 Best Books by Wilkie Collins: It's a collection of the 5 best novels by Wilkie Collins 1 - After Dark 2 - The Woman in White 3 - No Name 4 - Armadale 5 - The Moonstone 1 - After Dark is Wilkie Collins's first collection of six short stories, published in 1856. The book is a series of tales supposed to be told to poor travelling portrait-painter, William Kerby, who is forced to abandon his profession for six months in order to save his sight. 2 - The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. 3 - No Name is a novel by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1862. Illegitimacy is a major theme of the novel. It was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round before book publication. 4 - Armadale is a novel by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1864–66. It is the third of his four 'great novels' of the 1860s: after The Woman in White (1859–60) and No Name (1862), and before The Moonstone (1868). 5 - The Moonstone Wilkie Collins's spellbinding tale of romance, theft, and murder inspired a hugely popular genre–the detective mystery. Hinging on the theft of an enormous diamond originally stolen from an Indian shrine, this riveting novel features the innovative Sergeant Cuff, the hilarious house steward Gabriel Betteridge, a lovesick housemaid, and a mysterious band of Indian jugglers.