When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not much care, how it is to end.

This is a long way from saying plausibly that Trollope is to any extent a crime novelist. He did write at least one murder mystery, Phineas Redux, although it's only a murder mystery for the extent of 24 pages in my edition before Trollope the narrator reveals the identity of the killer. "The maintenance of any doubt on that matter, - were it even desirable to maintain a doubt, - would be altogether beyond the power of the present writer," says Trollope, and you can't help feeling he's silently adding "and beneath my dignity".

...

Trollope couldn't abide this sort of thing [detailing clueing in detective novels], as he made clear elsewhere in his Autobiography. 

... When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing that does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction.

J. Kerridge, ' "Fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone." Anthony Trollope: crime writer', Trollopiana 130 (2025), 5-6