The Moonstone

By: Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone, published in 1868, is one of Wilkie Collins' greatest detective novels. The book first appeared in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round and it is widely considered to be the first full length detective novel in English literature and it is still one of the most popular in that genre. The action centers around a young English woman who inherits an Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday which is stolen after she wears it at a party. Wilkie Collins was a prominent English writer in the 19th century. Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens and his books were often featured in Dickens' journals All the Year Round and Household Words. Collins' books still enjoy wide popularity, especially mystery and detective novels such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and Armadale.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1546598235
• ISBN13: 9781546598237
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 2.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Go ahead and yawn; you will not miss anything.

I understood that The Moonstone is a classic, so I decided to read it to be culturally literate. Well, the storyline may be interesting, but the writing is atrocious. It is clunky, bloated, and seemingly pointless. The characters just keep rattling. A lot of writers fill in the story with descriptions of time and place to give an atmosphere to the story. This writer (Wilkie Collins) just fills it with unrelated trivia. Occasionally, I would go back a few pages to see what I must have missed. When I read again, there was nothing there to miss. Either Wilkie is extremely monotonous or other writing from this period is, and I am just now lucky enough to find out. I talked to others about this, and they said, "Now you know why Sherlock Holmes is so popular" (as an alternative, which is much better written).