It is no coincidence that Collinsí most popular novels, The Woman in White and

The Moonstone, are those in which he most carefully constructs his narratives
through a technique that upholds suspense until the very last page; the plots
of these novels warrant a rigid, systematic narrative construction because of
the nature of their intratextual purpose, that of providing all the facts and
available information so as to determine the nature of the truth, and the need
to keep his readers looking for the solution to the mystery or crime. For Collins,
the nature of knowledge is subjective, and it is only by collecting as much
relevant information as possible that one can filter through the e mass of
potential meaning to discover a more objective truth.

Given that the plots are complicated by presenting a variety of perspectives,

Collins had to figure out a way to clearly present the case to the reader,
helping him or her along while still maintaining suspense. As each character
has his or her own point of view, providing different pieces of the puzzle from
his or her own experience, the plethora of factors, opinions, and available
information required some sort of manageable, reader-friendly binding
adhesive. Collins solves this problem by carefully constructing a series of
narratives, divvied up by character yet usually connected in a chronological
order, that work together (often in a literal sense by referencing other
charactersí narratives) to carry the plot as events unfold and toward
revelations of the truth. These narratives function, as Collins suggests through
the character of Walter Hartright in the Preamble to The Woman in White,
much like a court of law in which multiple witnesses are called upon in efforts
to ascertain the truth ìin its most direct and most intelligible aspectî; by having
each character give his or her own testimony, and by looking at them
collectively, we can ìtrace the course of one complete series of eventsî (4).
Collinsís ìfragmented, multi-vocal narrativesî were, as Lynn Pykett declares,
ìthe boldest experimentations with narrative form to be found in the sensation
mode.

The thrills of sensation fiction are also bound up with the secrecy and
suspicion, spying and detection which some twentieth-century critics have
associated with urban modernity, the culture of display, and the breakdown of
what Raymond Williams described as the traditional ‘knowable commu-
nity’. In a time of rapid social change and growing urbanisation, people

increasingly felt that they did not know their neighbours, nor did they
necessarily know how to ‘read’ them or their place (or indeed their own
place) in the social hierarchy.