William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). Collins's works were classified at the time as "sensation novels", a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. John Jago's Ghost, is a novella based on the Boorn Brothers murder case.