THE MOONSTONE (The English Comedie Humaine Series)

One of the biggest HA HAS I've ever read. Would have loved to be a guest at their dinner table!

Good and very interesting book for girls and boys. Will enrich child’s vocabulary.

The Moonstone is chock-full of everything a Victorian novel should have: vivid and colorful characters, intricate language, elaborate plots, and bizarre coincidences. The insight into Victorian ideas about race, class and gender alone gives it tremendous value and merit. This book simply shouldn't be read with modern expectations. Just sit back and let the story take you back to a different time and place. This edition with the explanatory notes is also very nice for any outmoded terms that you may come across.

T.S. Eliot was not exaggerating when he dubbed Collins' masterpiece "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels". The Moonstone, first published in 1868, is the magnum opus of suspense and intrigue that will surely please the avid mystery and/or classics buff. The adventure begins when the priceless yellow diamond from India, known as the 'Moonstone', is brought to English as spoils of war and is bestowed upon the spirited Rachel Verrinder on her 18th birthday. Chaos soon commences. The valuable jewel is stolen that very night and the entire household falls under suspicion - including a hunchbacked maid, an assemblage of enigmatic Indian jugglers, and Miss Verrinder's cousin Mr. Franklin Blake. Suspicion of thievery does not even escape Miss Verrinder herself. The famed Sergeant Cuff is summoned to the house to try and make sense of the baffling mystery of the diamond's disappearance and the strange events that ensue. The Moonstone is comprised of three novelettes and a handful of sub-sections, each narrated by three individuals (and a handful of other characters writing shorter supporting memoirs), with their own whimsical writing styles and detailed anecdotes about their adventures surrounding the jewel's disappearance and the aftermath. Their varying perspectives on incidents throw interesting light on the events unraveling around the reader. Introducing the novel is the household's elderly and garrulous manservant, Mr. Gabriel Betteredge, with his witty maxims and proverbial quotes from his personal bible, "Robinson Crusoe". The pious and almost-fanatical Miss Clack's cold recital of events, is followed soon after by Mr. Franklin Blake's narrative of events, and the mystery's final and most ingenious outcome. It will not disappoint. I leave you with a bit of insight bestowed upon us by the lovable and amusing Mr. Betteredge: "When my spirits are bad -- Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice -- Robinson Crusoe. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much -- Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain. Still, this don't look much like starting the story of the Diamond -- does it? I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where. We will take a new sheet of paper, if you please, and begin over again, with my best respects to you."

This is a book worth reading many times. I pick it up every couple of years and enjoy it more and more every time. Collins mocks and sympathizes with his characters at the same time. The mystery is fun. The plot is a bit slow. The characters make the book well worth the time. They are like old friends with all of the forgivable faults and quirks that mark the best of friends.

Wilkie Collins is considered by many to be the "Inventor" of the modern mystery. I state this not as an absolute, rather as a commonly held literary opinion. Other reviewers often refer to Mr. Collins in a review of a Charles Palliser Novel, or many others who are at the top of the Mystery Genre today. Mr. Collins was also a contemporary, literary collaborator, and business partner of another rather well known writer, Charles Dickens.This book later would influence the novel that Charles Dickens was never to complete "The Mystery Of Edwin Drood" due to his death in the midst of writing what was his final novel. There was a common denominator in these novels and it related to a drug, Laudanum. Mr. Collins was a user of the substance however I have never read of Mr. Dickens also having used the drug. When preparing for the book he was never to finish, Collins took Dickens to the opium dens of London, whether or not Dickens participated is a mystery along with the ending of his final work.Laudanum is a key factor in the mystery of the "Moonstone" that the book revolves around. Collins wanted to write a story that would be directly impacted by the use of the drug on a person or persons, with or without their knowledge, and how their behavior would be affected during a dramatic event while under the influence.Mr. Collins as mentioned was a consumer of this drug, when he set out to write the book he stated, "he would write the story as it would have happened, not how it may have happened". He was referring to his own experiences with the opiate, which takes an already complicated plot and adds the altered behavior Laudanum can have. The book is as complex as Palliser's "Quincunx", but I find it easier to follow "Moonstone".To the extent you feel a familiarity with the Author it may be because so much of what is written today is derivative. The "Diamond" that plays center stage in this work during the England of Queen Victoria was astonishingly "new" when published. I believe were it published again today under a new title and Author, it would be found again on the Bestseller Lists, as it was over a century ago,Mr. Collins writes with an elegant hand, which immerses the reader and binds him or her to the characters and the roles they play. The book is not brief as this was a time when Authors wrote as much as was needed, not what was allowed or could potentially be shown at the local multiplex.From the moment the diamond is found, and the story unfolds, clearly for some, less clearly for those who may have been influenced by something other than the dinner wine, the book will delight any reader of Mysteries. If Mr. Collins was not the absolute first to write a modern mystery, he certainly has yet to be surpassed by any other's pen.