The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) is widely regarded as the first great English detective novel — the book that assembled, for the first time, nearly every device the genre would come to live by. T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels," and it has never been out of print since the week it began appearing.

A great yellow diamond, looted in the eighteenth century from a sacred Hindu shrine, comes by a dead soldier's bequest to young Rachel Verinder on her birthday. That night it vanishes from her room in a house full of guests, servants, and three mysterious Indians watching from the grounds. Out of this single locked-room question Collins builds a masterpiece of suspense: the celebrated Sergeant Cuff, the rose-growing London detective modeled on a real Scotland Yard inspector; the warm, comic, Robinson Crusoe-quoting steward Gabriel Betteredge; and the broken, opium-eating physician Ezra Jennings, who alone understands the drug at the heart of the solution.

Collins tells the story through a chain of witnesses, each writing only what they saw, so that the reader assembles the truth document by document and detects alongside them — the founding example of fair-play mystery. Beneath the puzzle runs a quietly radical book about empire and theft: the diamond is plunder, the Indians are its rightful guardians, and the novel ends with the jewel restored to its shrine.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1868 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.