Purely coincidental

I've been reading (very slowly) Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone on my iPod Touch and today I open up the library copy of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a book that recreates a 1860 murder in an English country house, to read this in the introduction:

"...[the case] helped shape the fiction of the 1860s and beyond, most obviously Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, which was described by TS Eliot as the finest an best of all English detective novels. Whicher was the inspiration for that story's cryptic Serveant Cuff, who has influenced nearly every detective hero since."

Huh.