The Moonstone

I belong to two book clubs, and with one of them our next read is ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins. It’s years and years since I first read it; I think I may have heard it dramatised on the radio when I was a child, and certainly the strange name of the author would have appealed as much as the intriguing title.

It was published in 1868 having being serialised by Charles Dickens in his magazine. When I read it as a child, it just engaged me as a great detective story, much like Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Hercules Poirot or any of the other crime stories I read then. What I didn’t realise was that it was recognized as the first mystery or detective story. It all centres round a precious jewel called the Moonstone, not what we think of as a moonstone which is a sort of feldspar. In the novel the jewel is set into the forehead of a Hindu god and when stolen is tracked by three priests who over the centuries guard its location while being unable to recover it. It is stolen again by the evil Colonel Herncastle, a real bounder of the first order!

Like Collins’ other great book ‘The Woman in White’, ‘The Moonstone’ is extremely readable even after almost 150 years! I know I’m going to enjoy it, and look forward to meeting my friends to discuss it with them.

Wilkie Collins sounds an extraordinary man, with a complicated private life. He was born in 1824 in London, and he lived there for all his life although he travelled, researching his novels, and doing readings from them when they were published. He began to live with a young widow called Caroline Graves and her daughter in 1859, and although he put her down on census forms as his wife, he never married her. He began a relationship with a nineteen year-old girl, in 1862, when he was 38; she was Martha Rudd, and they had several children including Marian, Harriet and William. Collins died in 1889, Caroline died in 1895, and Martha in 1919.