Currently reading:

Wilkie Collins' The Law and the Lady, one of Collins' many B-novels, which are lots of fun, but nowhere near as amazing (and I do not use that word lightly) as the four novels he wrote during his peak in the 1860s: The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone. The Woman in White was so sensational that the Victorians created an entire new sub-genre to try to contain it (the sensation novel); The Moonstone is arguably our first fully fledged detective novel. The inbetweens show Collins moving from thriller to mystery, by way of various experiments in narrating stories about crime, detection, and secrecy. Collins was unusual in peaking early--and his success had much to do with his friendship with Dickens, who mentored him and annoyed him by turns, and who helped him sharpen his vision both by example and by trying to interfere with his work in ways that forced Collins to clarify for himself why he was doing things the way he was doing them and to stick by them. His later novels are weaker, baggier, reliant on tricks he derives from techniques of the 1860s, and slackened considerably by an addiction to opium that took the edge off more than just the pain from his chronic bouts of gout.

Published in 1875, The Law and the Lady is a product of Collins' later, duller days. It's still great fun to read, and it bears the main hallmarks of Collins' style--tight plotting, determined central characters who stubbornly bring logic to bear on horrible situations others wish to ignore, eccentric and deceptive minor characters who are foils for the relentless logic of the detecting main character. But the book also bears the main hallmarks of another novel by another major writer of the day--in its basic outline, it owes a great deal to Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux, which was published four years earlier, and which also features a man wrongfully accused of murder, a justice system unequal to unearthing the truth, a lady detective whose love for the accused leads her to feats of detection that clear the accused's name and so secure their love; there are also, in both novels, lots of scenes centered on nearly mad, disabled Scottish men who have it in their power to ease the sufferings of the principals but who refuse to do so out of spite.

All of which means that if you enjoy reading Victorian novels, you should read both The Law and the Lady and Phineas Redux--which means you also need to read Phineas Finn, which comes before Phineas Redux, so that you can read the sequel as a sequel. It's complicated, and it's a lot of pages. But it's worth it.