The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
Summary
Rachel Verinder receives a huge yellow diamond, the Moonstone, as a birthday gift from her uncle, Colonel Herncastle, who took it by theft and murder during the storming of Seringapatam in India decades earlier, along with it a curse and three hereditary Indian guardians sworn to recover the stone. The diamond disappears from Rachel's room the very night of her birthday, and Sergeant Cuff, a detective brought in from Scotland Yard with a habit of talking about roses whenever a case frustrates him, is brought in to investigate, only to be dismissed by the family before he can fully untangle what happened. The true story comes out slowly, through several different narrators each telling their own portion: Rosanna Spearman, a servant secretly in love with Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, hides evidence to protect him without knowing the full truth herself; Rachel, who saw something the night of the theft, refuses for most of the book to say what, protecting Franklin out of a love she cannot bring herself to voice; and Franklin himself discovers, to his own horror, that he took the diamond while unknowingly drugged with laudanum, secretly dosed by the physician Mr Candy as a jest, to answer Franklin's slighting remarks about medicine. The actual thief turns out to be Rachel's cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, a celebrated philanthropist who took the diamond from Franklin to cover embezzled trust money, and the three Indian guardians finally track Ablewhite down, kill him, and recover the Moonstone to carry it home.
Collins builds the whole novel out of competing, partial testimonies, a structure that keeps the reader working alongside Sergeant Cuff rather than simply being told the answer, and the multiple narrating voices, especially the pompous, endearing house steward Gabriel Betteredge, give the book real comic texture alongside its mystery. Collins wrote much of it while in serious pain and taking heavy doses of laudanum himself, and later said he had no memory of writing some of the chapters, an irony given how central opium and its effects are to the plot.
T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels," and Dorothy L. Sayers went further, calling it probably the finest detective story ever written.
Historical Context & Significance
The Moonstone was serialised in All the Year Round and simultaneously in Harper's in the United States between January and August 1868, with the book edition following from Tinsley Brothers in July of that year. Collins researched the multiple narrator structure and much of the diamond's Indian backstory carefully, and Sergeant Cuff was modelled on the real Scotland Yard detective Jonathan Whicher.
The novel is now credited with helping establish many of the conventions later detective fiction would depend on, the country house theft, the initially baffled professional detective, the crucial clue hiding in plain sight, and both T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton named it among the very best of the genre it helped invent. It has been adapted for film since the silent era and remains a fixture of BBC television, most recently in 2016.