We may only be just over half way through the year, but I think this is going to be one of my main classics reads for 2018. It was lengthy, full of OTT description (my fave, no, really) and is hailed as being the first full detective story in English literature.
Written in the same epoch as Dickens' novels, the Bronte sisters' and Hardys', Collins explores the parameters of what a 19th-Century English novel can be. He uses the familiar multi-narrator tool to give us glimpses of the story from a variety of different viewpoints, making the story more intricate with each one. But, he goes beyond this with each narrator forming part of a mystery being examined by a number of detectives.
At the start of the novel, the reader is introduced to the Moonstone, a one-of-a-kind diamond plundered from the depths of India. Once it has been taken to England, a series of deaths connected to the diamond raise the suspicion that it is cursed. Knowing this, a malicious uncle leaves it to his niece in his will, hoping that it will bring despair upon her and her mother.
And it does, but not in the way you would expect. On the first night in the house, the Moonstone goes missing. As a local detective is brought in, everyone is under suspicion, from the servant girls right up to the head of the house. But the detectives come up with nothing.
The rest of the story tracks the mystery surrounding the loss of the Moonstone, as well as minor mysteries entangled in this cursed object.
If you want to understand in more depth the progression of the detective novel from its conception up to the modern day, I would definitely recommend starting with this, as it opens up a variety of tropes in traditional crime fiction.
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