ABSTRACT
Collins returned to short stories by the mid-1870s; his visit to American in 1873–4 gave him new contacts there. A long story, ‘John Jago’s Ghost’, reworked a real US crime story while others dealt with crime and at times the supernatural, in some instances re-working the themes of recent stories. The rest of the short narratives from this second period all deal with problems of romance, usually with benign outcomes. The first series, running from 1876 until 1881, focussed mostly on male figures, but the later stories, up to 1887, tend to use a female as the central figure, almost all of both sequences are set in Britain and in a fairly recent period.
