William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand before reading law as a student at Lincoln's Inn. However his real passion was for writing and, in 1850, he published his first novel, Antonina.

In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. An unconventional individual, he never married but established long-term liaisons with two separate partners. He died in 1889.

Joseph Smith Fletcher was a British journalist, writer, and fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He studied law before turning to journalism. His literary career spanned approximately 200 books on a wide variety of subjects including fiction, non-fiction, histories, historical fiction, and mysteries. He was known as one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Golden Age.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded a variety of activity and creative work that made him an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet 'the good giant'.

He was the nephew of 'Dickie Doyle' the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes. He set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he began to write.

His growing success as an author enabled him to give up his practice and turn his attention to other subjects. His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained international status and constantly distracted him from his other work; at one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life.

And in his creation of Dr Watson, Holmes's companion in adventure and chronicler, Conan Doyle produced not only a perfect foil for Holmes but also one of the most famous narrators in fiction.

Born in Abergavenny in 1876, Ethel Lina White was one of the best known crime writers of the 1930s and 40s, ranking alongside greats of the Golden Age such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Many of her thrillers were adapted for film, most famously The Lady Vanishes (originally titled The Wheel Spins) which became one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest triumphs as a director. Originally published as Some Must Watch in 1933, The Spiral Staircase has since been adapted for the screen three times.