The door of the sitting-room was thrown open violently; the courier's wife rushed in like a mad woman. 'He's dead! they've murdered him!' Those wild words were all she could say. She dropped on her knees at the foot of the sofa - held out her hand with something clasped in it-and fell back in a swoon. A crumbling palace hastily made over as a luxury hotel, a man gone missing, and an anonymous letterset the scene for The Haunted Hotel. Wilkie Collins, undisputed inventor of the detective novel, published this Mystery of Modern Venice in 1879, at the end of his prolific career. Most of his novels, amongst which The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), were first serialized in magazines edited by his friend Charles Dickens with whom he travelled to Italy and notably to Venice in 1853.The Dream-Woman : Suddenly awakened in the dead of night, a young man sees a woman with a knife in her hand looking at him... Is she a dream, or that other creature from the unknown world called among men by the name of ghost?
