Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone follows Lady Julia Verinder’s family and employees in their attempt to retrieve the priceless diamond of the book’s title—which was first plundered by her brother, “the wicked Colonel” John Herncastle, during a violent colonial conquest in India, then gifted to Julia’s daughter Rachel on her birthday, and finally stolen from the Verinder estate that same night. T.S. Eliot famously called the book “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels,” a reputation that is well-deserved: although Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes and the works of Agatha Christie remain the detective genre’s best-known exemplars, The Moonstone not only predated and influenced these subsequent works, but in fact singlehandedly set the template for mystery novels for at least the next century. From the realization that the thief must be in the family’s inner circle to the eccentric, shrewd character of Sergeant Cuff, who sees damning evidence in details others fail to detect, and finally to the hidden feuds, divisions, and romances exposed as the investigation takes over the family’s lives, The Moonstone’s emphasis on uncovering the hidden truth of events by interpreting and following the clues—and on forcing the reader to do this alongside the book’s litany of detective figures—turned it into the foundation for an entire, massively popular genre.
The novel’s plot revolves around the search for the lost Moonstone, a thrilling and suspenseful process of investigation that proceeds through the careful investigation and analysis of evidence. Nearly all of Collins’s characters find themselves suspected of the theft at one point or another, including the disfigured maid and reformed convict Rosanna Spearman, the three Indian Brahmins who mysteriously show up at the Verinder estate after the Diamond’s theft, Rachel Verinder’s cousins and love interests Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite, Rachel’s maid Penelope Betteredge, and even Rachel herself. Everyone is under suspicion and everything is a possible clue, and the Verinder estate turns from a normal manor into a sea of possible evidence and red herrings. Indeed, when the prototypically savvy detective Sergeant Cuff gets involved in the case, he determines that a small smear on the paint of Rachel’s door will lead to the thief.
This kind of investigation is the template for the rest of the novel: characters discover a new clue, follow it until it reveals something about another character, and then revise their theory of the theft accordingly. Later, Franklin Blake discovers an incontestable piece of evidence naming himself as the culprit, which leaves the case seemingly insoluble. He then makes a breakthrough when the doctor Ezra Jennings figures out that his actions can be attributed to opium—but Jennings only does this by analyzing his own set of clues: the ill doctor Mr. Candy’s disjointed words that are actually Candy’s attempt at telling a coherent story. This means of investigation is a powerful metaphor for the detection process whose unraveling forms the centerpiece of the book.
By highlighting the similarities between literary interpretation and the investigation of clues—both of which involve picking significant information out of a sea of possible clues and using that information to develop a holistic theory—the novel also turns the reader into the detective. First, although the entire novel is narrated in retrospect (after the Diamond has long been lost and the culprits discovered), the reader is made to follow along with the investigation, learning each bit of information as it is revealed to each narrator. The narrators repeatedly insist that they must refrain from offering more details and instead limit themselves to what they knew at the time about which they are writing. Indeed, the novel’s multiple narrators add to the investigative work the reader must undertake in order to figure out what really happened, just as the multiple suspects add to the detectives’ work. From the stoic, traditional, sexist Gabriel Betteredge to the obstinate, moralistic Miss Clack, to Franklin Blake, who edits and compiles the narratives but is also partially responsible for the crime, all of the narrators have their own biases and perspectives on one other. The novel’s internal twists, turns, and cliffhangers are also products of its original serialized format: like many Victorian novels, it was published through weekly installments. Not only did this mean that the novel’s dedicated readers quite literally spent a year guessing and waiting to learn who was the culprit, but it also means that Collins had a chance to respond to the novel’s growing popularity and the readers’ suspicions.
Through both its subject matter and its relationship to the reader, The Moonstone set important precedents for subsequent detective fiction. The characters’ attitudes toward clues—everything is a potential clue, and no stone may be left unturned—is a central trope in nearly all the mystery fiction that followed. So is the realization that the thief must be among the apparent protagonists, and the discovery that he or she is one of the least suspicious of all. Even the book’s setting has become a cliché: to the cotemporary reader, an English country manor is often synonymous with mystery, suspense, and horror stories. And, of course, the reading experience of the detective novel—which extended in the twentieth century to the viewing experience of police and crime thrillers on TV—remains deeply indebted to Collins’s decision to bring the reader along with the investigation.
Perhaps unbeknownst to its author, The Moonstone’s “detective fever” would catch on for generations to come. And yet it is much more than the typical detective novels that followed it: not only is it the novel that made these subsequent works possible, but by turning detective into reader and reader into detective it also makes an important commentary on the nature of literary interpretation: one must consider everything as a possible clue and follow those which produce a coherent story about the intentions underlying a text—or crime.
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Detective Methods and Genre Standards Quotes in The Moonstone
The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!
You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice Robinson Crusoe. In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout. Robinson Crusoe hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
Lord bless us! it roar a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. 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 seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an 'O' as the Bouncers themselves.
“Do you mean to tell me, in plain English,” I said, “that Miss Rachel has stolen her own Diamond?”
“Yes,” says the Sergeant; “that is what I mean to tell you, in so many words. Miss Verinder has been in secret possession of the Moonstone from first to last; and she has taken Rosanna Spearman into her confidence, because she has calculated on our suspecting Rosanna Spearman of the theft. There is the whole case in a nutshell. Collar me again, Mr. Betteredge. If it's any vent to your feelings, collar me again.”
“Her ladyship has smoothed matters over for the present very cleverly,” said the Sergeant. “But this family scandal is of the sort that bursts up again when you least expect it. We shall have more detective-business on our hands, sir, before the Moonstone is many months older.”
*NOTE. Added by Franklin Blake — Miss Clack may make her mind quite easy on this point. Nothing will be added, altered, or removed, in her manuscript, or in any of the other manuscripts which pass through my hands. Whatever opinions any of the writers may express, whatever peculiarities of treatment may mark, and perhaps in a literary sense, disfigure, the narratives which I am now collecting, not a line will be tampered with anywhere, from first to last. As genuine documents they are sent to me—and as genuine documents I shall preserve them; endorsed by the attestations of witnesses who can speak to the facts. It only remains to be added, that “the person chiefly concerned' in Miss Clack's narrative, is happy enough at the present moment, not only to brave the smartest exercise of Miss Clack's pen, but even to recognize its unquestionable value as an instrument for the exhibition of Miss Clack’s character.
“In the name of the Regent of the Night, whose seat is on the Antelope, whose arms embrace the four corners of the earth.
Brothers, turn your faces to the south, and come to me in the street of many noises, which leads down to the muddy river.
The reason is this.
My own eyes have seen it.”
“Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach, sir? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? Ah! not yet? It will lay hold of you at Cobb's Hole, Mr. Franklin. I call it the detective-fever; and I first caught it in the company of Sergeant Cuff.”
The nightgown itself would reveal the truth; for, in all probability, the nightgown was marked with its owner's name.
I took it up from the sand, and looked for the mark.
I found the mark, and read —
MY OWN NAME.
“If you had spoken when you ought to have spoken,” I began: “if you had done me the common justice to explain yourself—”
She broke in on me with a cry of fury. The few words I had said seemed to have lashed her on the instant in to a frenzy of rage.
“Explain myself!” she repeated. “Oh! is there another man like this in the world? I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my own character is at stake; and he—of all human beings, he—turns on me now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself ! After believing in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of him by day, and dreaming of him by night—he wonders I didn't charge him with his disgrace the first time we met: ‘My heart's darling, you are a Thief! My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!’ That is what I ought to have said. You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have lost fifty Diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it lying now!”
“I wish I had never taken it out of the bank,” he said to himself. “It was safe in the bank.”
“It's only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake.”
“Robbery!” whispered the boy, pointing, in high delight, to the empty box.
“You were told to wait downstairs,” I said. “Go away!”
“And Murder!” added Gooseberry, pointing, with a keener relish still, to the man on the bed.
There was something so hideous in the boy's enjoyment of the horror of the scene, that I took him by the two shoulders and put him out of the room.
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne—seated on his typical antelope, with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth—there, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!
