The Moonstone

"I first came across Wilkie Collins thanks to Five Books co-founder, Al Breach. We had just finished high school and were teaching in a rural school in Zimbabwe. By candlelight (there was no electricity or running water where we were), Al peered into The Woman in White every night and raved about what a fantastic book it was. Collins was a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens , who I’d been forced to read at school, and so it was only five years later that I finally succumbed and opened my first book by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone . The book starts in India, but is mostly set in England, and revolves around the family and country house that the Indian diamond, ‘the Moonstone’ is stolen from. First published in 1868, The Moonstone is—and will always be—a Victorian novel, but the writing is very accessible. The different narrators talk directly to the reader, as if to a friend or confidant. Some are very funny, like the house steward, Gabriel Betteredge, who uses Robinson Crusoe as a kind of Bible to guide him in life. Most important of all for me, the plot is excellent. Great claims have been made for The Moonstone in the history of detective fiction. TS Eliot, for example, said it was “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels.” I have read other early detective stories, from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee , written anonymously in 18th century China and translated during World War II by a Dutch diplomat, Robert van Gulik. These are a lot of fun and very interesting, but they don’t speak to me the way The Moonstone does. For me, Collins’s novel is the first one where I felt completely engaged in the story and needed to know what happened next. Our interview about Wilkie Collins is with Professor Jason Hall of the University of Exeter"

"Now, The Moonstone is one of the first proper English murder mysteries. Well, deaths occur, although they are not the central mystery, which is slightly different. But I do think you can lump it into the class of English detective fiction, and although its debatable, The Moonstone has a good claim on being the first of those. Wilkie Collins was a great 19th-century writer, who came out of the gothic tradition. Everything is quite isolated, there are dangerous characters, there is threat and death and corruption lurking in the background. He’s also interested in social mores. His other great book, The Woman in White , is about the place of women in society, particularly how women could become discarded by their upper-class lovers. The Moonstone is interesting because it is a classic country house mystery, where this cast of upper-class, slightly wacky, slightly exaggerated characters are all gathered for an 18th birthday. There’s this mysterious, possibly cursed, diamond at the centre—the ‘moonstone’ itself. And not only is it one of the earliest examples of the genre of a single individual trying to work out who committed a crime by tracking down clues and interviewing people, it is also one of the very first to subvert the genre. Sorry, this will be a spoiler. Okay. Well, the extraordinary thing about it is that the detective realises that he committed the crime himself whilst in a laudanum-induced haze. An extraordinary thing! I’m not sure anyone else has done it, actually. Agatha Christie, famously, wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , in which—another spoiler—the narrator was the murderer all along and kept it from you. But in The Moonstone , the narrator discovering that he is a criminal at the end of the book is much stranger. It’s really interesting. Yes, you solve the crime. It’s rather like the old ‘choose your own adventure’ books that a lot of us remember fondly from our youths. They’re the ones where you direct the storyline by turning to page 35 if you examine the cave, or page 112 if you want to chase the mysterious stranger. I’ve written a number of murder mystery novels , and I thought it would be fun to allow the reader to become the hero of the story for a change. Because, whenever we read books, we really always want to be inside them, as one of the characters. Probably the sleuth, the one who is pointing the finger in the great denouement. So this gives people a chance to do that. Well, I’m not a great planner. I’m kind of the opposite: I just start down and start writing, and see where it takes me. That sort of works when you are writing something like Murder at Christmas . I’m constantly going back and editing and changing things, instead of meticulously planning in advance as some writers do. That’s much more efficient, I’m sure, but it doesn’t work for me."

"Like The Woman in White, it’s one of the novels by Collins people are likely to know. It’s another with several characters, lots of perspectives, a great mystery at the middle of it. It’s the first novel that makes detection its whole business; it introduces Sergeant Cuff, a memorable literary detective. But we’d had detective novels before, Bleak House (1853) has Inspector Bucket, who plays a significant role in the second half. And we’d had the Edgar Allan Poe Dupin detective stories (1841-44). So it’s not as if it were operating in a vacuum. It’s fun because it has some of the weirdest characters: Miss Clack the forceful evangelical, for example, who goes around throwing religious tracts at people’s carriages. It’s so diverting for readers to move from an earnest narrator, to a frivolous narrator, or even a crazy narrator. Exactly, he asks: how do you keep your readers on the edge of their seats? Some of his serialisations ran for a year in weekly instalments. Having edited one of them, I can see it first-hand. I consulted the manuscript of Jezebel’s Daughter as well as the original serialised version, the three-volume edition, and the one-volume edition. He clearly knows how to write in serialised form, and how that form will then translate into a novel. You can see how he breaks it up. He even inserts in his manuscripts “stop here,” or “end of serialisation part 1.” He internalises that frequency of writing. It’s about having this many words to fill per instalment and needing to introduce a scenario, a few characters, to leave the reader with something to make them come back. He’s very good at building intensity, diminishing it, building it up again, and staging that out across the weeks. It affected how he was able to write. Illness and addiction to pain relief keep you from your desk. For a writer whose money comes in because he delivers on time and delivers a lot, this was a real concern. He battled throughout his life with the ups and downs this addiction produced."