William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. In 1867 Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins collaborated to produce a stage play titled No Thoroughfare. Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, Walter Wilding. After the death of one — now a proprietor of a wine merchant's company — the executors are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean — across the Alps in winter.