TS Eliot said it was 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels'. Audrey Niffenegger on why Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone still thrills Readers are chaotic. I am, anyway. I read out of order: Franz Kafka before Mark Twain, Mary Shelley before Lady Murasaki. I read To Kill a Mockingbird at 45, Women in Love at 12 (not that I understood much of it, but I tried). A History of Literature based on my reading habits would be haphazard in the extreme. And I imagine that other readers behave much the same, hunting and gathering in libraries and bookstores, reading by whim, slowly accumulating an internal world, book by book.
It would be delightful to be able to read a book as its original readers did, to have the impact of the experience without knowing what would come after. Wilkie Collins's masterpiece, The Moonstone, must have seemed especially strange and new to its first readers. It was the first detective novel written in English. There are whole sections of bookstores, vast swaths of ISBNs devoted to The Moonstone's progeny. I happened to read it after the Sherlock Holmes stories, after Dracula, after Lord Peter Wimsey and Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe. But its first audience read it as a serial in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. I suppose we could recreate this experience by reading one chapter each week and firmly putting the book away in the intervals, but I am much too impatient for that, myself.
In The Moonstone, Collins invents a number of characters, situations and strategies that would shape thousands of detective novels to come. He brought us the professional bumbling policeman who is forced to give way to the detective of superior genius; the gifted amateur sleuth and his less perceptive sidekick; the party at an isolated country house which becomes the scene of an inexplicable crime; the beautiful but perverse heroine; the battle between rationality and superstition; and the notion of fair play for the reader in the presentation of clues. It's true that a reader schooled by nearly 150 years of subsequent detective fiction won't have much trouble sorting out whodunit, but how they did it is quite ingenious, more than worthy of any later master of the genre.
The greatest pleasures of The Moonstone are its characters. Gabriel Betteredge, who is house-steward to the Verinder family and a Robinson Crusoe devotee as well as the book's first narrator, is wonderfully lively and opinionated, and he is certainly the equal of Dr Watson as an observer and chronicler of detectives. Sergeant Cuff establishes the convention of the great detective with tender hobbies (Cuff is a fanatical gardener, as Holmes will later be a devoted beekeeper) but Cuff is based on a real London policeman, Inspector Whicher, and he is carefully presented as a man of honour as well as brains.
Collins was a rather unconventional person, and he was able to write sympathetically about fictional people of many classes and both genders. His female characters are often intelligent and decisive; they tend to have more volition than other imaginary women of their era. The Moonstone's plot is driven by the women; the men spend the entire book trying to figure out what the women are up to: Rosanna Spearman, a reformed thief turned servant girl, is a moving study of the effects of unrequited love on an unattractive woman.
Because The Moonstone is built on such irrational behaviour, the rationality of the detectives is stymied and the solution of the mystery is delayed. TS Eliot said of it that it was "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels"; the book's length is partly a result of its original serial form, and partly the product of its narrative conceit: it is told by a series of narrators, who give us evidence, as though we will be called upon to decide the outcome. The artful presentation and withholding of clues is the essence of the detective novel. Collins, by shifting perspective and through the willfulness of his characters, contrives to keep us guessing for an impressive number of pages.
The Moonstone was the last of Collins's four best novels. It appeared in 1868, following The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), and Armadale (1866). He wrote another 20 books, but they are seldom read now; most of them are marred by heavy-handed social crusading. Many aspects of Collins's strongest work are shaped by his unusual life. His addiction to laudanum, following an illness, affected the plot of The Moonstone, and his first encounter with his mistress, Caroline Graves, which occurred at night outside a large villa near Regent's Park, was the inspiration for the opening scenes of The Woman in White (she screamed and ran up to Collins and his friends dressed in "flowing white robes" then ran away, and Collins ran after her). Collins supported Graves and her daughter until his death. At some point he formed a liaison with another woman, Martha Rudd, and had two daughters with her. He maintained both families simultaneously, but never married. Perhaps these relationships were a source of Collins's nuanced understanding of his female characters.
Reading The Moonstone now, I am impressed by its modernity, its tolerance, and its enthusiasm for weirdness within the constraints of Victorian propriety. Something new burst into literature with The Moonstone - even now it is still possible to thrill to this new thing; the detective novel - and here it is.
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