The Moonstone

By: Collins, Wilkie

Widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels, The Moonstone tells of the events surrounding the disappearance of a mysterious (and cursed) yellow diamond. T. S. Eliot called it 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. It contains a number of ideas which became common tropes of the genre, including a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed, and two police officers who exemplify respectively the 'Scotland Yard bungler' and the skilled, professional detective.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN13: 9798573879642
• Release Date: November 2020
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 1.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.7" x 8.5"

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).