The Moonstone

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. The story was serialised in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage in 1877. The book is regarded by some as the precursor of the modern mystery novel and the suspense novel. T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe," and Dorothy L. Sayers praised it as "probably the very finest detective story ever written".