Which British novelist wrote 'The Moonstone', considered the first detective novel?

Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone, the 1868 British novel widely regarded as one of the first modern detective novels.

The story begins when Rachel Verinder inherits a large Indian diamond, the Moonstone, on her eighteenth birthday. The jewel is stolen that night, and the mystery unfolds through the accounts of several narrators. This multi-perspective structure lets readers compare testimony, motives and evidence rather than following a single storyteller.

Collins helped establish conventions that became central to detective fiction: a sensational crime, a closed circle of suspects, misleading clues, forensic-style reasoning and a professional investigator. The investigator Sergeant Cuff is an important ancestor of later fictional detectives, although Franklin Blake and other characters also help uncover the truth.

The novel first appeared as a serial in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round before being issued in book form. It is often called the first detective novel, but that label is a literary shorthand: earlier works contained investigative elements. Collins’s achievement was to bring those elements together in a sustained, influential mystery.