Who wrote the 1868 detective novel The Moonstone?

Wilkie Collins wrote the 1868 detective novel “The Moonstone.”

“The Moonstone” centers on the theft of a large Indian diamond and the efforts to discover who took it. Collins structures the novel through multiple narrators, allowing different witnesses and participants to describe events from their own perspectives. This form creates both clues and contradictions.

The novel is widely regarded as one of the earliest major detective novels in English. Sergeant Cuff, the investigator, is a professional detective whose methods include close observation, questioning, and inference. The book also combines domestic drama, colonial history, suspense, and mystery.

Readers sometimes associate “The Moonstone” with Charles Dickens because Dickens published it in his periodical “All the Year Round.” Collins and Dickens were friends and collaborators, but Collins alone wrote the novel. The book appeared several years after Collins’s earlier sensation novel “The Woman in White.”