The Moonstone

Written by Wilkie Collins

Narrated by LibriVox Community

The story concerns a young woman called Rachel Verinder who inherits a large Indian diamond, the Moonstone, on her eighteenth birthday.

The book is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels. 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: a large number of suspects, red herrings, a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed, and two police officers who exemplify respectively the 'local bungler' and the skilled, professional, Scotland Yard detective. (Summary from Wikipedia)

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. Collins himself demonstrated some artistic talent and had a painting hung in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1849, but his real passion was for writing. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand but hated it. He left and read law as a student at Lincoln's Inn but already his writing career was flowering. His first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. Collins was an unconventional individual: he never married but established long term liaisons with two separate households. He died in 1889.

Reviews for The Moonstone

[srjohnson007 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I started this book with some trepidation given its length and the historical period in which it was written. However I was quickly immersed in the story and found myself wishing it would never end. As other reviewers have pointed out, every feature of a modern mystery is here . The author has a wonderful sense of humor, and the characters are well developed. I particularly love reading something actually written in the middle of the nineteenth century and seeing that people weren't so very different then.