The Moonstone - Book 10

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a wonderful Victorian mystery novel.  It has got all the prerequisite elements.  It is long and full of detail.  The characters in the story are well crafted.  The dialogue is witty, and there is the sort of romanticized interplay between science and illness that is so often a part of these types of stories.  What is especially clever about this book is that it is written in the form of several reports, journals, letters, etc all pieced together to tell the story from different perspectives.

The yellow diamond, known as the Moonstone, was stolen unscrupulously from a Hindu (or Hindoo as Collins spells it) temple.  Since then there is a curse upon it and there are three Brahmin whose job it is to retrieve the diamond and return it to its rightful place.

The officer who stole the diamond is ostracized from his family, but when he dies he creates much mischief by leaving it to his niece, Rachel Verinder.  This book has many characters.  There is Lady Verinder, Rachel's mother, Rachel's two suitors, Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite, a longtime faithful servant, Gabriel Betteredge  (who is a delightful character), and his daughter, another maid who was taken in from a reformatory, Mr. Murthwaite, an aquaintance of the family who is an expert on India, Miss Clack, a distant cousin, Mr. Bruff, the family attorney, Mr. Candy, the local doctor and his mysterious assistant, Ezra Jennings.  There is a Sergeant Cuff, a highly successful detective, who would rather be tending roses all day.

The story twists and turns and finally reaches its just conclusion.

Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens.  Even though I love Dickens, I do think he can be a bit difficult to read.  Collins is much easier, I found.  I read up a bit about Collins.  Apparently and unfortunately, he became addicted to opium because of the gout he suffered.  The last years of his life were spent in the throes of this addiction.  Opium figures heavily in this story.  The other interesting thing I noted is Collins attitude towards marriage in the story.  He expresses a conventional view of it in the book and deprecates the villain for keeping a lady he (the villain) is not married to. But apparently Collins never married but instead lived with one woman for years, who then left him to marry someone else, but then left her husband and moved back with Collins!  And during the later portion of this relationship Collins openly took up with another quite younger woman whom he installed in a house down the street.  There were a few children born of these various alliances as well.   So much for stuffy Victorian society!

But none of this comes out in the book, which I found to be a nice satisfying read on these cold winter nights in February.  I thoroughly enjoyed the tale.

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