The Moonstone
Written by Wilkie Collins
Narrated by LibriVox Community
4/5
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About this audiobook
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)
Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins, hijo del paisajista William Collins, nació en Londres en 1824. Fue aprendiz en una compañía de comercio de té, estudió Derecho, hizo sus pinitos como pintor y actor, y antes de conocer a Charles Dickens en 1851, había publicado ya una biografía de su padre, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R. A. (1848), una novela histórica, Antonina (1850), y un libro de viajes, Rambles Beyond Railways (1851). Pero el encuentro con Dickens fue decisivo para la trayectoria literaria de ambos. Basil (ALBA CLÁSICA núm. VI; ALBA MÍNUS núm.) inició en 1852 una serie de novelas «sensacionales», llenas de misterio y violencia pero siempre dentro de un entorno de clase media, que, con su técnica brillante y su compleja estructura, sentaron las bases del moderno relato detectivesco y obtuvieron en seguida una gran repercusión: La dama de blanco (1860), Armadale (1862) o La Piedra Lunar (1868) fueron tan aplaudidas como imitadas. Sin nombre (1862; ALBA CLÁSICA núm. XVII; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XI) y Marido y mujer (1870; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XVI; ALBA MÍNUS núm.), también de este período, están escritas sin embargo con otras pautas, y sus heroínas son mujeres dramáticamente condicionadas por una arbitraria, aunque real, situación legal. En la década de 1870, Collins ensayó temas y formas nuevos: La pobre señorita Finch (1871-1872; ALBA CLÁSICA núm. XXVI; ALBA MÍNUS núm 5.) es un buen ejemplo de esta época. El novelista murió en Londres en 1889, después de una larga carrera de éxitos.
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Reviews for The Moonstone
19 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I 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.