An Aside to the Reader
Some readers will note we have done something quite unusual in Brimstone. Perhaps certain English professors will shake their heads and wonder that such a vile offense could have been committed against great literature.
We are speaking of how we’ve brazenly lifted the character of Count Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco from the pages of The Woman in White, the great novel by the Victorian author Wilkie Collins, and inserted him bodily into Brimstone.
For those not familiar with Collins, he invented the modern detective novel with the publication of his work The Moonstone. The Woman in White, published a few years earlier in 1860, was in our opinion his greatest novel and one of the most popular books of the Victorian Age. Today it is well-nigh forgotten.
We apologize for purloining the character of Count Fosco. Yet it is the highest tribute we can pay to one of our favorite writers, who has certainly influenced our own fiction. We owe an enormous debt to Wilkie Collins, as do all writers of detective fiction (whether they know it or not). If, perchance, this prompts some of our more adventurous readers to pick up The Woman in White, we will be very pleased. And to those critics who protest the pilfering of Fosco as a trangression against literature, we respond:
Braveggia, urla! T’affretta
a palesarmi il fondo dell’alma ria!