It's been decades since I read Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, and I had forgotten how fascinating that book is. Like many authors of his time, Collins wrote the book as a serial for magazine publication in both the U.K. and the United States; his style is not exactly cliff-hanger, but the end of each chapter leaves you with pleasurable anticipation of what will happen in the next one.
The Moonstone starts with the theft of a legendary diamond from an Indian temple, and the curse that follows the diamond and anyone who possesses it. The diamond is bequeathed as a birthday gift to a young woman, Rachel Verinder, who wears it to her birthday dinner; that night the diamond is stolen from her room. Careful searching by her cousin Franklin Blake and Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard, reputed to be the best detective in England, produces no sign of the diamond. Rachel refuses to cooperate with the investigation and in fact, opposes the continuation of it.
Wilkie Collins uses successive multiple viewpoints to move the story forward, starting with that of Gabriel Betteredge, the elderly Verinder family head servant, who is much given to consulting the oracle of his tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe in moments of doubt or distress and who makes a very creditable Watson to Sergeant Cuff. Betteredge narrates the story up to the loss of the diamond; the evangelistic and annoying Miss Clack takes up the narrative to contribute what she herself has witnessed and overheard following the disappearance of the diamond; the family attorney, Mr. Bruff then contributes his share of the story, and it moves on through several more narrators to its eventual resolution. Wilkie Collins rightly called the story a "romance", and it's a fascinating one. Grade: A.
The Woman In White, published in 1860, six years before The Moonstone, also uses multiple viewpoints to narrate the story, although most of the story is carried by Walter Hartright, an artist and illustrator, who does most of the detective work, and by Marian Holcombe. The story starts with an encounter one night between Hartright and a mysterious woman dressed all in white who asks the way to London. He gives it to her, then shortly thereafter finds that she has escaped from a lunatic asylum. He again encounters her in a country churchyard and realizes that she closely resembles Laura Fairly, his drawing student with whom he has fallen in love. Laura is engaged to and subsequently marries Sir Percival Glyde, who connives with his friend, the menacing Count Fosco, to gain control of Laura's considerable fortune, while Walter Hartright is absent on a scientific expedition to Central America. When Hartright returns, he is told that Laura has died, but suspects that it was Anne Catherick, the mysterious woman in white, who has died instead. Aided by Laura's elder half sister, Marian Halcombe, who has liberated Laura from the lunatic asylum where Sir Percival had concealed her under Anne Catherick's name, Walter proceeds to have Laura's identity restored to her. Grade: B.