The Haunted Hotel: a Mystery of Modern Venice

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist and playwright, best known for The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The Haunted Hotel is "unusually horrific" for Collins and, in addition to supernatural elements, contains detective procedures and an insurance fraud relying on substituted identity. This volume also contains My Lady's Money, largely concerned with the eventual marriage of the heroine, the 'Exhaustive System of Reasoning' and Old Sharon, the pipe-smoking detective who works out the problem by deduction, are both possible influences on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.