Which novel by Wilkie Collins is considered the first English detective novel?

The Moonstone is the Wilkie Collins novel often considered the first English detective novel.

Published in 1868, The Moonstone is an epistolary mystery about the theft of a large Indian diamond from an English country house. Its story is assembled from accounts by several narrators, including the household steward Gabriel Betteredge, the determined Franklin Blake, and Sergeant Cuff, a highly capable investigator associated with Scotland Yard.

The novel helped establish many conventions that later became standard in detective fiction: a professional investigator, a country-house crime, an apparently limited group of suspects, red herrings, false leads, an inside job, and a final reconstruction of the crime. Its use of multiple narrators also lets readers compare incomplete or biased accounts as the mystery unfolds.

The claim is not an absolute statement about every earlier mystery. Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories began earlier, and critics have proposed works such as The Notting Hill Mystery as possible predecessors. However, among Wilkie Collins’s novels, The Moonstone is the canonical answer and is widely credited with helping establish the modern English detective novel. The Woman in White is another famous Collins mystery, but it is generally classified as an earlier sensation novel.