‘The Haunted Hotel’ is a story which, like others of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s stories, fascinates the reader, and compels him to finish it at a sitting. It has, too, this merit, that as the story progresses one is forced to recall the facts of the earlier part, and see the object for which they were related and the bearing they have upon subsequent events. It is often possible to put together a mass of intricate details none of which is irrelevant, but it is a rare skill which can make it plain to a reader reading at full speed that they all had their necessity and proper effect. Few writers can do this so well as Mr. Wilkie Collins. The mystery in ‘The Haunted Hotel’ is grim enough to please a keen appetite for grisly horrors, without glutting it by matter of fact description. A good deal is left for imagination to fill up. Whether or not the reader is meant to guess the explanation of the courier’s disappearance, as he probably will if he is at all practiced in mysteries, is not of much importance. Having guessed it, he will still read with undiminished interest to see how it is worked out. There is, it seems, one defect in the story. It is a mystery with an explanation; but one particular fact which is not a mystery has no explanation….
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