The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
“When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else.”
It is one of Collins’ novels that most people are probably familiar with. Another one with many people, many points of view, and a compelling mystery in the middle. It’s the first book to focus solely on detection, and it features Sergeant Cuff, a beloved fictional detective. It’s entertaining because it has some of the strangest personalities, such Miss Clack, a pushy evangelical who throws religious literature at passing carriages.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
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On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives The Moonstone, a yellow diamond that was stolen from an Indian temple and is thought to bring its owner bad luck. The priceless stone is stolen again the next night, and when Sergeant Cuff is called in to look into the case, he quickly learns that no one in Rachel’s home is exempt from suspicion. The Moonstone is a marvellously taut and sophisticated tale of mystery, in which facts and memory can prove treacherous and not everyone is as they initially appear. T. S. Eliot praised it as “the earliest, the longest, and greatest of modern English detective novels.”
The Moonstone is examined as a piece of Victorian sensation fiction and an early example of the detective genre in Sandra Kemp’s introduction, which also touches on the use of numerous narrators, the significance of opium, and Collins’s sources and personal allusions.
At the beginning of the story, there was a brief description of a group that appeared to be suspects (outside the house where it happened), with only a later clue (reading between the lines) of participation. From the beginning of the investigation through the latter evening when the diamond is placed away for safekeeping but is unsafe and stolen, every description and every character’s movement are detailed in the following tales…
