Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone--a brilliant but flawed diamond--was pried from the forehead of a Hindu idol by a British officer in India. He brought the stolen jewel back to England as a family heirloom, bequeathing it to his niece, but on the night of her 18th birthday, the Moonstone goes missing. Everyone at the Yorkshire family estate is under suspicion; London detective Sergeant Cuff must solve the crime.


The Moonstone is the godfather of the classic English detective story, its founding text. In the 1920s, T. S. Eliot, claiming that the genre had been "invented by Collins and not by Poe," declared it to be "the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels." Dorothy L. Sayers, the queen of crime fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, echoing Eliot, pronounced it "probably the finest detective story ever written." Now, in its complete and unabridged form, it has been newly designed and typeset in double-column format for easy reading by Waking Lion Press.