The Moonstone
A diamond is given to a young woman on her birthday, and by the next morning it has vanished from a locked room. Collins tells the story through a series of witnesses, including a housekeeper, a doctor and a policeman, and each account contradicts the others in small ways.
It is usually called the first English detective novel, and it is also a novel about empire: the diamond was taken from India, and the men who come to recover it are treated as an exotic threat. The plotting is meticulous, and the final explanation is fair to the reader in a way that few later detective novels bother to be.
Public-domain status
First published in 1868. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Wilkie Collins died in 1889, so this work has been free to republish there since 1960.
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Keep reading
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- The Innocence of Father Brown — G. K. Chesterton, 1911
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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