What Book to Read?

The Moonstone (1868) has been called ‘the first … and greatest of English detective novels’ by no less a critic than T.S. Eliot. In fact it wasn’t the first – that honour going to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) by ‘Charles Felix’ – but it was certainly the first really popular story about crime and its detection. Some of the devices Collins invented for this tale have been used by later detective writers, and there is a detective in the book. However I wouldn’t really call it a detective novel. I think of it as a mystery, and see it as the starting place for stories where someone who is not a detective finds the solution.

The Moonstone is an Indian diamond, stolen during the British assault on Serringapatam, and brought secretly toEnglandby Colonel Herncastle, who leaves it to his niece, Rachael Verinder – possibly as an act of malice, since the jewel seems to bring bad luck. The very day she receives it, it disappears. Has it been taken by one of the family? Or one of the servants? Or by the Indian jugglers who have been hanging round the house? After the local police prove useless, Sergeant Cuff from Scotland Yard is called in. He makes some discoveries, but is unable to find the diamond. As he later says, ‘It’s only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake’. Franklin Blake, a guest in the house when the diamond disappeared, has a particular reason for wanting to know what happened, and sets about finding out. But there are nasty surprises and apparent dead ends in store for him in his quest.

The story is told as a series of witness accounts, with each narrator telling only the events of which he or she has personal knowledge. This helps make the story convincing. Narrators include Gabriel Betteredge, steward in the Verinder household, Drusilla Clack, an evangelical spinster, Mr Bruff, the family lawyer, and Franklin Blake himself. (He has asked for these accounts to be collected, by which we know there has to be a happy ending.) One of Collins’s foremost achievements is to give each of the major narrators a different voice. Betteredge is loquacious, opinionated but kindly; he is a self confessed sufferer from the disease of ‘detective-fever’. Clack keeps a diary to ‘discipline the fallen nature we all inherit from Adam’, and is pious with an underlying spite. Bruff is judicious and measured and Blake the educated nineteenth century gentleman. There is a good deal of quiet humour in all this, a useful antidote to such elements of melodrama in the writing as ‘she started up – the noble creature! – and followed me across the outer room …’ There is also real tragedy, and at times a real sense of menace, generated by the unlucky diamond.

Collins very cleverly poses what seems to be an insoluble riddle, and then shows just how to make sense of it. He subtitled the story ‘a romance’, by which he meant an adventure story – or as John Buchan later wrote, a story ‘where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’ – rather than a love story, though it is that too. The events which are the key to the mystery do rather defy the probabilities, but probably can’t be dismissed as completely unrealistic. And the pieces of the mystery all fit together brilliantly; whether or not it is strictly a detective novel, Eliot is certainly right that it is one of the great crime stories.

You can read more about The Moonstone here. And you can read my earlier post on Collins’s other masterpiece, The Woman in White, here.