The Moonstone

The novel's prologue, a first-person account of the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, establishes the Moonstone as loot before it is ever a gift: John Herncastle kills its Hindu guardians to take it, and the curse the dying priest pronounces on whoever possesses it unjustly is less supernatural machinery than Collins's way of keeping the theft itself in view throughout what follows. The three disguised Brahmins who track the diamond across decades to Yorkshire are the novel's return of the colonial repressed, figures the English household reads as sinister foreign mystics when they are, in the book's own moral arithmetic, the diamond's rightful claimants pursuing stolen property.

Collins builds the mystery entirely out of competing, partial witnesses, the literal-minded steward Gabriel Betteredge, the pious and insufferable Miss Clack, the lawyer Bruff, Franklin Blake himself, each supplying a written account for reasons the frame narrative makes explicit, and the gaps between what one narrator notices and what another does becomes the novel's actual detective method. The device that would define the genre, Sergeant Cuff's outside investigation, matters less to the plot's resolution than the household's own selective blindness: everyone closest to the theft has a reason, vanity, propriety, love, not to see what's directly in front of them.

The solution Collins builds toward, that Franklin Blake stole the diamond himself while sleepwalking under an opium dose he never knowingly took, lets the novel stage a theft with no villain inside it: Ezra Jennings, the outcast doctor addicted to opium for his own terminal illness, reconstructs the crime by dosing Blake again under controlled conditions and watching him reenact it. Collins, himself dependent on laudanum while writing the novel for his own chronic pain, uses Jennings's marginalized status, his mixed race and addiction make him a pariah in Yorkshire society, to place the book's clearest thinking in its least trusted narrator.

Rosanna, a servant with a criminal past and a hopeless love for Blake she knows can never be returned, hides evidence that could clear him without understanding what actually happened, then drowns herself in the Shivering Sand, the quicksand she has spent the novel treating as a private confidant. Her note, addressed to Blake and left unread by him for most of the book, is Collins's bleakest joke on the whole detective-fiction apparatus: the person who came closest to solving the case was never in a position, socially or narratively, to be listened to.