I read this as a buddy read with my Goodreads’ friend Laura, and it was fun to discuss it as we went along. Reading it with her helped me persist and finish it. I’m appreciative to her for waiting for me while I waited for my library copy and then sometimes waiting for me to catch up with her while we read.

This book is incredibly hard for me to rate and even more difficult to review.

I’m going to settle on 2 stars, possibly coming close to 2 ½ stars. As usual, I’m rating based on my personal reading experience. What’s weird is that I can’t give it a higher rating, but usually I regret reading anything less than a 3 star book and sometimes anything less than a 4 star book. I’m getting pickier and pickier about how I spend my reading time. Yet I’m glad I read this book and I certainly enjoyed parts of it. Mostly it was just okay though. It was easy to put down and usually not easy to pick up, and when I read it was a struggle and rarely a page-turner. Much of the time it felt like work to read it. I read most of it at a glacial pace, and felt frustrated. At times it felt tortuous, at times I got pleasure from reading it.

I usually read everything in a book. Absolutely everything. I didn’t read the two introductions (many pages!) before I read the novel because luckily they warned of spoilers. I ‘d intended to read them after I finished the novel, but I didn’t. I’m skipping them. When I finished the last page of the novel I felt as though I’d read enough and didn’t want to read more about the book, except for some more Goodreads members’ reviews.

Part of my difficulty, I think, is that it had been many years since I’d read books from this era. It took me time to get used to the writing style. Anachronisms abound but since the book was written in the mid-1800s and the bulk of the story does take place during 1848-1849 I could forgive the sensibilities expressed. The sexism, nationalism, classism, and possibly racism were to be expected. The book was published as a serial and I could tell. It felt slow and meandering and sometimes confusing, and a lot happens, but I didn’t like the flow of the narrative. Also, the chapter numbers showed up just anywhere on the pages and were not highlighted for noticing in any way. I didn’t like the structure. My copy at least had a Contents page that showed the different narratives with the names of the characters narrating and their corresponding page numbers. That helped a lot. I sent that information to my buddy because she didn’t even have that as a guide of what was to come in her edition.

There were multiple narrators and that I found fun. I liked quite a few of the characters. Some just got dropped though, never to return. A couple of the characters are real hoots. I did enjoy a lot of the humor in the book. It is funny and witty and there is a lot of irreverence, all positives. I did smile and chuckle frequently. I did enjoy portions of it.

One main aspect re the solving of the mystery less than thrilled me (though it could have been worse) and I did like the two main resolutions. I also liked the unsolved mystery about one character. I thought that having that loose end made the book better. I have read that this is considered the “first modern mystery” and if that’s true it’s a decent one.

When I realized that one of the main characters was an avid fan of the book Robinson Crusoe I looked up that book’s plot and interpretations since I haven’t read it, and I was afraid I’d dislike this book because of what I learned about that novel, but it turned out to not really interfere with what enjoyment I had.

One thing that surprised me was that one of the characters, an attorney, said “Cool!” and used the expression in the way we would today. I thought that meaning of the word originated in the 1950s. I guess not.

I know that this book has mostly high ratings here and I look forward to seeing why others feel as they do about the book. I’ve read some reviews of it over the years. Now I’ll read more. Other than that I’m happy to be done with this book. Of all the Wilkie Collins books I thought I’d like this one best though I guess I’ll leave Woman in White on my to read list, at least for now.

Rereads generally work very well for me, as I have memory like a sieve. However, some books are more rewarding when re-reading than others and I usually only find out once I have committed to the reread. I first read The Moonstone decades ago and I enjoyed it very much, unfortunately even my poor memory still retains the outrageous denouement to the central mystery of the theft of the eponymous diamond. Still, I was curious to reread it as I remember enjoying it so much.


The Moonstone is about the theft of an Indian diamond from a country house on the night of a birthday party for eighteen-year-old Rachel Verinder. The theft and its continued disappearance have serious repercussions for the two main characters of the novel throughout the book which spans about a year. It also, directly and indirectly, causes the death of several characters. First published in 1868, this novel is deservedly lauded as the “proto-detective” novel.

The novel is structured in the epistolary format where multiple characters narrate sections of the story through their written accounts of their involvement in the case. The different narrative tones are very skillfully written, with the distinctive personality of each narrator coming through clearly. Some of the narrators are rather eccentric and unreliable and this adds a lot of flavors and humour to the narrative. I particularly like the grumpy butler Gabriel Betteredge who uses the book Robinson Crusoe as if it is  The I Ching , the fanatical evangelist, and – best of all – the almost Sherlockian Sergeant Cuff who would have solved the crime single-handedly if not for the stupid meddling kids (basically the two main characters Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder.

There are quite a few other colorful characters I could mention but, if you are interested to read this book, the less you know about it the better.

There are a couple of issues with this book for me, the solution to the mystery stretches believability, but I suppose that is what makes it so memorable. The other issue is the depiction of Indian characters as inscrutable, sinister people, too foreign to be understood, not to mention evil. Racist much?

Sinister foreign types on this edition’s cover.

Neither flaws are too injurious to the overall quality of the book, it is a product of its time after all, and even ahead of its time in some ways. If you have never read Victorian literature before The Moonstone may be the ideal starting point, it is very readable even for modern readers who are not familiar with Victorian prose style. Wilkie Collins’  The Woman in White is even better than this (a lot better I would say) so I would recommend that as a starting point also.

Rating: 5 stars for the first read, 4 stars for the reread.

Note:
I mostly reread this book in  audiobook format, provided free by Librivox . As with the printed edition the book has multiple narrators, unfortunately, this is to the detriment of the audiobook as some readers are better than others; ranging from perfect to awful. The Mrs. Clack chapters are particularly hard to listen to. Ah well, can’t complain, they all graciously narrated the book for free, for which I am grateful.

Addendum: I just found an  alternate Librivox edition narrated by a single reader, Tony Addison, it does not sound like an improvement on the multiple readers one to be honest, but you may want to listen to some samples.

Quotes:
“the nature of a man’s tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man’s business. Show me any two things more opposite one from the other than a rose and a thief; and I’ll correct my tastes accordingly.”

“Sergeant Cuff never laughed. On the few occasions when anything amused him, he curled up a little at the corners of the lips, nothing more.”

“Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!”

“The cook looked as if she could grill Mr. Superintendent alive on a furnace, and the other women looked as if they could eat him when he was done.”

Sergeant Cuff is awesome!

“‘Take a drop more grog, Mr. Franklin, and you’ll get over the weakness of believing in facts! […]’”

This advice on the part of Mr Betteredge, the butler, is excellent for anyone willing to read Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and being too much given to measure fiction by their own experience. Much of what happens in connection with the Moonstone mystery is definitely far-fetched, and a glass of grog or whisky will help you muster up the necessary degree of generosity. And if you still believe in facts, why! at least you have enjoyed a dram of something.

They say that The Moonstone, which was published in 1868, is the first genuine detective novel, even though to my knowledge it was Edgar Allan Poe, who was the first to send a private detective onto the literary stage – Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), and so Collins’s Sergeant Cuff might not be the first sleuth in world literature, but with his melancholy bearing and his interest in roses, which leads him into long conversations with Lady Verinder’s gardener, he is at least the first memorable one. Apart from that, Collins might have been the first author to have written an entire novel around a criminal case, and one that never has a single length but manages to maintain a high degree of suspense at that. It is also clear that Charles Dickens, Collins’s friend, was probably induced by the immense success of this novel to try his hand at a murder mystery, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which would never be finished by the Inimitable due to his untimely death. [1]

The Moonstone has lots of things that will be familiar to avid readers of detective novels, and Collins may well be credited with their invention, e.g. a manor as the scene of a crime and one (or more) people staying there as having something to do with it, and an abundance of clues leading in all sorts of directions. Many seemingly unimportant details mentioned by Mr. Betteredge, who gives the first account of the crime, will later prove meaningful and important to the solution of the mystery, but lots of other clues will lead you astray. At the heart of the story is the theft of a gem, the eponymous Moonstone, that has a sacred meaning in the Hindoo religion and that was robbed from a Hindoo site by a dubious Englishman, Colonel Herncastle, brother to Lady Verinder. Feeling snubbed by his sister, the Colonel bequeaths the jewel to Lady Verinder’s daughter Rachel, in the hope that it may prove a curse to the young woman’s life, a hope that apparently fulfils itself when the diamond is stolen on Rachel’s birthday and suspicion falls on a variety of people, even on Rachel herself. The investigation, started by Rachel’s cousin, and lover, Franklin Blake, will cause even more woe than the loss of the valuable jewel itself, resulting, among other catastrophes, in the suicide of one of the servants in the household. You may frown at the solution of the mystery, as it unfolds itself in the last quarter of the novel, because it depends on many unlikely coincidences but then another glass of grog might bring you around in no time, and you will find that you have just read a fascinating, if slightly lurid, detective novel.

The Moonstone is also remarkable for the variety of perspectives that Collins uses in his narration because there is no omniscient narrator but a handful of eye-witnesses are giving their accounts of various parts of the story, which will face you with unreliable narrators and different viewpoints and which gives Collins the opportunity to use different styles. Collins shows that he has a soft spot for social outsiders like the maid Rosanna Spearman, who is a reformed criminal and who suffers from a physical deformaty, or the doctor’s assistant Ezra Jennings, whose gypsy origins make him a dubious character in the eyes of his prejudiced contemporaries. The author himself clearly does not condone the stereotyped thinking of his English fellow-people but treats these characters with respect and dignity, which is also true of the three Indian men who try to recover the diamond and who are not merely depicted as representatives of some exotic evil.

As to Rosanna, for instance, we have Betteredge muse on her sad lot and come up with the idea that she is the same age as his own daughter Penelope and that if Penelope had faced the same drawbacks in her early life, she might have ended up the same way as Rosanna did. In her letter to Mr. Blake, Collins has Rosanna write things like this,

”Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress, and took her ornaments off? […] I can’t expect you to read my letter, if I write it in this way. But it does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress does it, and her confidence in herself.”

So, it’s the dress and the privileges that make a lady, after all, isn’t it? There are also other social mores that Collins slyly attacks in this novel, especially Christian hypocrisy – in the character of Miss Clack – or in sentences like the following, which can be found in Mr. Betteredge’s account: ”The other women took to their Bibles and hymn-books, and looked as sour as verjuice over their reading — a result, which I have observed, in my sphere of life, to follow generally on the performance of acts of piety at unaccustomed periods of the day.”, or, even more daringly, ”I have myself (in spite of the bishops and the clergy) an unfeigned respect for the Church”.

Unlike Dickens, Collins also has rather interesting female characters at the centre of his stories: In this case, there is Miss Rachel, who might have come over as quite spoilt and bloody-minded to the average contemporary reader but who definitely has her own principles and code of honour and who has her heart in the right spot, even though her behaviour might puzzle you at first.

The Moonstone was the first book I ever read by Wilkie Collins, more than twenty years ago, and it raised my expectations as to Collins quite high – with the deplorable effect that my second encounter with this author proved a disappointment and weaned me from him for the next fifteen years or so, but eventually I came to realize that there is a lot more to discover about this friend of Dickens’s.

[1] Interestingly, the mutual inspiration Dickens and Collins drew from each other might have led Collins to come up with a character like Sergeant Cuff in the first place since it was in his novel Bleak House (1852/53) that Dickens, who has always been greatly interested in modern police methods, made use of a highly efficient and unerring police detective by the name of Bucket.

This is the kind of book that is a volume filled with words where almost every sentence is twice as long as it needs to be and very redundant because first it says what it has to say and then it repeats exactly the same thing except with different words. This would be bad enough with interesting characters and a gripping plot. I gave up in the quicksand: DNF.

I have heard the start of this novel numerous times, having tried to listen to it on audiobook many times but never remaining awake long enough to get beyond the opening. Now having read my way to the end I feel ambivalent towards it; I would not have missed anything great if I’d just kept falling at the first chapter yet I don’t feel it was a complete waste of time.

It is a Victorian melodrama cum shaggy dog story with wicked uncles, malevolent gangs, a cursed diamond, theft, unrequited love, death and suicide. There is so much to cram in that, even though getting on for 600 pages, the theft takes place almost immediately and it is stolen from a young girl on the same night she is given it so there is no sense of build-up or shock or even desire to see it retrieved – either on the reader’s side or it appears most of the characters (they seem to know where it is for a year without doing anything about it). The finale is truly one of the most outlandish things I’ve read and the aha moment of the doctor’s confession rings about as true as Kier Starmer not being able to afford a trip to Specsavers. The conclusion of the book is disjointed from everything that has gone before and doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, however if you think of it in terms of weekly serialisation I can see how these faults would not loom as large.

Having read The Woman in White only a few months ago the multiple narrator structure was no surprise. As in TWIW some narrators are more engaging than others. The aged, loyal servant Betteredge is one of the better ones, and it is charming to see his horizons being broadened by his interactions with Sergeant Cuff to a point where he can see himself existing in his own right, with his own thoughts and interests beyond just those of his employer. It is lovely to see him at seventy years of age after a lifetime in service throwing himself into the role of detective. Although he can be prissy, somewhat curmudgeonly and very disparaging when he talks of his wife and daughter he does have a dry wit and brings the humour to the otherwise sluggish proceedings. Take this example of his aside to the reader after being cared for by his daughter,

n   “Here I should have protested again. But my daughter had got the hair-brush by this time, and the whole strength of her feelings had passed into that. If you are bald, you will understand how she sacrificed me. If you are not, skip this bit, and thank God you have got something in the way of a defence between your hair-brush and your head.”n

His daughter is a good counterfoil to her father as she represents the new breed of servant who believe they are more than just vessels for the whims of their employers and are starting to question whether they are not equal to their betters.

The other great narrator is the nosey, busy-bodying spinster Miss Clack who just happens to find herself in cupboards or behind curtains while important conversations are going on and for a myriad of reasons cannot disclose her presence until the conversation has ended and the participants exited the room. Her personal pointlessness – other than gossip about others – is emphasised by the charity work she does. She is a committee member for a charity whose purpose is,

n  " …to rescue unredeemed fathers’ trousers from the pawnbroker, and to prevent their resumption, on the part of the irreclaimable parent, by abridging them immediately to suit the proportions of the innocent son."n

The dullest narrators are the hero and the solicitor which is a shame as they are the ones in charge of revealing the denouement , which because of its ridiculous and frankly overlong and convoluted nature really deserved a more engaging storyteller.

In conclusion I am glad I read such a well-known contribution to the canon of English novels, I didn’t hate it and some parts were enjoyable to read but it is not by any stretch a great book.

As good as anything I've read by Dickens. What a wonderful gallery of characters! House steward Gabriel Betteridge, with his overall loyalty and decency, and constant use of Robinson Crusoe as a guide through life, is one of the great characters in literature. That said, I found the haunted doctor Ezra Jennings to be one of those secondary characters that stay with you forever. Anyway, as many have noted, The Moonstone is considered the first, and still among the very best, of detective novels. I suppose so. It has a great detective in the rose loving Sgt. Cuff, but the reading impact of this book goes beyond the guilty pleasure of a genre read. The novel is bookended in such a way -- with the theft and eventual recovery of the diamond -- as to leave you feeling that you've just finished a piece of great and epic literature. Collins' obvious swipe at the human cost of British imperialism must have been considered bold stuff at the time.

The problem with mysteries – for me, anyway, is that I don't care who did it. Which is a drawback. I just think well, it's one of those characters the author has given a name to, it won't be the fourth man back on the upper deck of the omnibus mentioned briefly on page 211. It will be someone with a name. And further, it will be someone who you don't think it will be, because that's the whole point. You don't think it's going to be that person so it's a surprise. So, if it turns out to be the not-obvious person (how could the little spinster with the gammy foot batter the ten foot Guardsman to death and scale the west wall on the fateful night? Well, she was on Victorian crack is how) I say – wow, how obvious. She was really not obviously the murderer, so she was obviously the murderer.

However, I really liked Wilkie's novels The Woman in White and No Name, so I read this.

In a modern detective tale, you have your detective, and there is a detective in this one, but he only occupies a short part of the story, he quickly retires to grow roses, literally, that's not a euphemism for some kind of rent boy scandal, so the rest of the story is made up by narratives from five or six main characters.

Now comes the dance of the seven veils.

Because if two narrators had been given their voice, the whole novel would have been over in 50 pages. You get the longwinded thoughts of all the people who DON'T know what actually happened. By page 350, after being mumbled at, prevaricated over, and digressed to for what seemed days, NAY, weeks, by Wilkie Collins' five narrators, all of whom suffer from amusing psychological tics and endearing human flaws, or was it the other way round, and all of whom could have summarised their tales onto two pages of foolscap, I was ready to shrink myself to the size of a capital R (pronounced "aargh") and insert myself into this novel Fantastic Voyage-style and grab a passing amateur sleuth and confess loudly I STOLE YOUR DAMNED MOONSTONE, ARREST ME, AND THERE'S AN END OF IT!

(Memo - write future review of Victorian novel as if invested into it Fantastic Voyage-style. Should be hilarious.)

Actually, there is a point to all this 430 pages of Moonstone. The whole plot, and this, strangely enough, is not a spoiler, hangs on the attempt of one guy to give up smoking. So The Moonstone is a very elaborate warning that going cold turkey is a bad idea,

you must use the patches.

The Moonstone is often cited as the earliest medical warning story – later examples are Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, which concerns self-medication and its dangers, and Henry James' Daisy Miller, which explains to tourists that they must get all their vaccinations. The genre is still thriving - the recent movie Bad Lieutenant – Port of New Orleans is all about inappropriate methods of combating severe back pain.

In the end I thought this was the Monkees instead of The Beatles, Pleasant Valley Sunday instead of Tomorrow Never Knows.

به نام او
‌
" ماه الماس نخستین و بزرگترین رمانِ پلیسیِ انگلیسی است."
این جمله تی.اس.الیوت شاعر و منتقد معروفِ انگلستانی در موردِ شاهکارِ ویلکی کالینز ابداً اغراق و مداهنه نیست.
ماه الماس یکی از بهترین رمانهای کلاسیکی‌ست که تا به حال خوانده‌ام.
توجه بفرمایید جمله بالا را کسی می‌گوید که همواره به ادبیات انگلستان با دید تردید نگریسته است (هرچند با تاسف تمام هنوز اثری از چارلز دیکنز نخوانده است) و در بین رمانهایی که از این ادبیات خوانده کمتر اثری او را جذب خود کرده است.
باری حساب ماه الماس جداست.

همانطور که در جمله الیوت آمده ماه الماس رمانی پلیسی‌ست و آن هم اولین رمان پلیسی ادبیات انگلیسی زبان
ولی واقعیتش را بخواهید برای من باورکردنی نیست که ماه الماس اولین باشد چرا که نوع روایت داستان و گره افکنی‌هایش بسیار قوام یافته‌تر و پیشرفته‌تر از آن است که اولین باشد. اینگونه به نظر می‌رسد که کالینز از چندین و چند تجربه جنایی‌نویسی باید بهره برده باشد تا بتواند چنین رمانی بنویسد. یا کارگاه کاف را که اولین کاراگاه آثار ادبی می‌دانند بسیار پخته‌تر از هر اولینی رفتار می‌کند

کتاب در حدود ۶۵۰ صفحه است و جالب این است که داستان لحظه‌ای از ریتم نمی‌افتد (امری که در داستان پلیسی بسیار حیاتی‌ست) و نویسنده برای هر قسمت ایده منحصر به فردی دارد. داستان به شیوه پلی‌فونیک یا چندصدایی روایت می‌شود که این هم در نوع خود با توجه به سال نوشتن رمان (اواسط قرن نوزده) امری بدیع بوده است.
نکته جالب دیگر این کتاب به زعم من شخصیت‌پردازی رمان است. ماه الماس با اینکه رمانی کلاسیک است ولی در شخصیت‌پردازیها کمتر دچار رخوت و کسالتی که مشخصه غالب رمانهای آن زمان است می‌شود. و شخصیتها چنان پیچیده هستند که خواننده بارها در طول خواندن رمان نسبت به آنها احساسات مختلفی اتخاذ می‌کند. خود کالینز در جایی از رمان از زبان یکی از شخصیتها در مورد رمانهای کلاسیک می‌نویسد:
《همه از جمله آثار کلاسیک؛ و البته همه بی‌اندازه برتر از چیزهائی که بعدها منتشر شد؛ و همه (از لحاظ من) این مزیت بزرگ را دارند که دل هیچ‌کس را نمی‌ربایند و مغز هیچ‌کس را داغ نمی‌کنند.》

آخرین نکته ترجمه بی‌نظیر منوچهر بدیعی است نثر بدیعی خود یک اثر ادبی مجزا است پر از ظرافت و زیبایی. بدیعی علاوه بر آن که زبان مبدا را به خوبی میشناسد (بالاخره مترجم اولیس است). فارسی را در فصاحت و بلاغتی رشک برانگیز به کار می‌برد. در ترجمه رمان بارها با ارجاعت نحوی قرآنی یا تلمیح‌هایی به اشعار سعدی حافظ و مولوی روبرو هستیم که این خود بر ملاحت شاهکار کالینز افزوده است، به جملات زیر توجه بفرمایید:
《شنیده‌ایم که از "ابلیس آدم‌رو" سخن می‌گویند من معتقدم مثالِ "فرشته‌سیرتانِ دیوصورت" به مراتب به حقیقت نزدیک‌تراست》

Ενα καταπληκτικό κλασσικο βιβλίο γραμμένο το 1868 και είναι το πρώτο αστυνομικό βιβλίο στην αγγλική γλώσσα. Πρόκειται για ένα σπάνιο διαμάντι μεγάλης αξίας απο την Ινδία που χάθηκε μυστηριωδώς από τον τελευταίο κάτοχο του. Διαβάζουμε για την πορεία του διαμαντιού από τις διηγήσεις των χαρακτήρων του βιβλίου. Η ιστορία εξελίσσεται την Βικτωριανή εποχή ( από τις αγαπημένες μου ) και ο συγγραφέας δεν μας αποκαλύπτει τον δράστη στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος του βιβλίου. Σίγουρα θα σας αρέσει!!

We had our breakfasts - whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

Thus began an entire genre. I loved The Woman in White a number of years ago, and was also fully enthralled by The Moonstone. It's regarded as the first English detective novel, and it's such a good, fat, satisfying read. The excitement of a really great Victorian sensation novel - a missing diamond, huge dollops of Orientalism, an illicit affair, opium, quicksand - and some quite modern plot devices, in particular the skillful use of multiple narrators. Faithful old family servant Gabriel Betteredge is a treat, and I was sad when his section was done, but the ensuing Miss Clack was hilarious and had me re-reading her bon mots aloud. What a delightful book.

An Inside Job
26 March 2017

tI had no idea that this book existed until my bookclub decided to make it the book of the month. In fact I had never heard of Wilkie Collins until this book was mentioned in passing. As it turns out (or at least according to some of the members of my bookclub) Wilkie lived under the shadow of Charles Dickens. In fact Wilkie and Dickens were good friends, that is until they had a falling out, and Dickens went out of his way to trash the works of Wilkie (and vice versa – I guess we can work out who won). I'm not really all that sure of any of the details beyond that, namely because I can't be bothered looking it up, even though this statement seems to be based upon a rumour that I heard from another person. The other thing about Wilkins, and this book in particular, was that I had some trouble finding it in a bookshop and ended up having to order it in, only to wander into a secondhand bookshop a week later to see a copy of this book, and Woman in White sitting on the shelf – it always happens like that.

tSo, the Moonstone is about this huge diamond that is stolen from India and finds its way to England and into the possession of a wealthy young lady (who inherited it from her uncle, who had originally stolen it from India). On her eighteenth birthday party she proudly wears it, but later that night it goes missing, and suddenly the mystery as to what happened to the diamond and who stole it begins. However, unlike most detective stories that I have read, where the mystery is pretty much solved within 24 to 48 hours of it happening, it isn't and everybody goes home. However, a year later the hunt for the diamond begins again in ernst and the mystery is eventually solved, though not as we would expect it to be solved.

tApparently The Moonstone is the first ever detective novel, though there was a discussion as to whether Wilkie or Poe were the first to write in this specific style of genre (apparently Poe was first, but because his story was a short story Wilkie is attributed to having the first full length novel). However the interesting thing is that it doesn't necessarily set the standard for how the genre developed in the future, though as I have said numerous times in the past, the detective novel, or even crime fiction, isn't a genre that really catches my attention. I have tried to read Agatha Christie, and despite really enjoying And Then There Were None I wasn't able to get into any of the other novels of hers that I read (though I'll probably try a couple more but I am not rushing out to do so). As for Doyle, as I have also previously mentioned, while at first I really enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, as the series dragged on I become less and less enthralled with the character and the stories.

tThe thing is that in my mind the idea of the detective fiction is that it is a game between the author and the reader to see if they can actually solve the problem before everything is revealed at the end, however my Dad, who is an avid reader of the genre, suggests that this generally isn't the case. For instance the Butler never, ever actually does it, and if he does it is generally considered to be so clichéd that the book is tossed into the recycling bin before anybody else can pick it up and have their intelligence insulted. As for Agatha Christie, my Dad suggests that her conclusions are so contrived that it is almost impossible to work it out (for instance in one of the books it turned out that everybody did it, though I still hold to my theory that Miss Marple is the real criminal, it is just that she is so clever at being able to throw the scent off the trail and pin the crime onto somebody else that she is never ever suspected, let alone caught).

tMind you, when I read a detective novel I generally give up trying to solve the problem pretty quickly, namely because that isn't the reason why I read – if I wanted to solve problems I would go and try debugging computer programs, or even write my own, or have an extended session on Duolingo – to me novels aren't designed to solve problems, but rather to open up one's mind to other possibilities, and to explore these possibilities through sites like Goodreads, or even my own blog. The other thing is that I suspect this style of detective fiction is rather new and wasn't the way that the original authors of the genre intended it to be.

tThe other thing about The Moonstone is that it was surprisingly amusing, which also baffled me because I never considered classical literature to actually be funny. Mind you, they probably are quite amusing, it is just that the style of humour, and the subtle references, are something that we generally wouldn't understand. Okay, I have known, and even done so myself, people who have burst out laughing at the plays of Aristophanes, and I also note that we have a few Roman comedies available, however it seems as if for quite a while most pieces of literature were actually quite serious, but then again we do have Shakespeare so I guess I am just talking rubbish again.

tThe really amusing thing about this book was the character who swore by the book Robinson Crusoe, which I have to admit does have a tendency to poke fun at those of us who happen to be religious. In fact sometimes I wonder myself at the absurdity of putting one's faith in the writings of a group of people that lived thousands of years ago. In fact a lot of people completely write off the writings of the ancients in that as far as they are concerned, if it was written over a thousand years ago then it has absolutely no application to the world today. Personally, I would disagree, though I guess the whole idea of basing one's life around Robinson Crusoe is that there is a difference between somebody who simply blindly follows a religious text, and those who go out of their way to completely debunk the text only to discover that no matter how hard they try the text stands up to scrutiny. Mind you, this does eventually come down to the way that you go about debunking the text.

tAs for basing your life around Robinson Crusoe, well, I'm sure it is possible, but I'm not really going to give it a try. Maybe I'll just stick with Mr Men (though I hope I haven't lost the one that I thought I put in my bag this morning).

The following is a recently found letter written by the English author Charles Dickens to his friend Wilkie Collins concerning the latter’s newly released 1868 novel The Moonstone:

Charles Dickens
11 Gad’s Hill Place
Hingham, Kent
England

November 13, 1868

Dear Wilkie,

I am now pressing my pen against this paper to congratulate you on the success of your excellent new novel, The Moonstone. I have just completed reading it and I would like to present you with my opinion that this was, as they say, a true “page turner” in every sense of the word. I am also taking the liberty to take this compliment a step further by stating that this is one of the finest mystery novels of all time.

I must confess that I have never actually read a book such as this that captures the sensation of a mysterious theft and a thorough investigation that follows it. It was a fascinating read throughout as the solution to the mystery was also entirely above my suspicion. I also thoroughly enjoyed the use of multi-narration where the reader obtains various different viewpoints during the inquiry concerning the loss of the Indian diamond.

I believe that this novel, The Moonstone, has successfully maintained the same exceptional level of quality as your masterpiece, The Woman in White, and it ranks among the top tiers of the written pages from our fellow countrymen. I have not the shadow of a doubt that this book will continue to enthrall readers for centuries to come. The Moonstone is a best-seller at the local bookseller here in Kent and my excitement for your continued success is immense. Well done, my dear friend Wilkie. We shall celebrate this achievement over a glass of Cognac. Best wishes and I look forward to reading your future works.


Your friend always,

Charles Dickens