Eliot and Chesterton were among the fans of Wilkie Collins's 'perfect' prototype detective
"Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach, sir? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? Ah! Not yet? It will lay hold of you… I call it the detective fever." In 1865 the Constance Kent case made Jonathan "Jack" Whicher a household name, and Britain succumbed to a protracted bout of the affliction thus diagnosed in Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel The Moonstone.
Seized during the storming of Seringapatam, the eponymous moonstone – a fabulous Hindu diamond "unfathomable as the heavens themselves" – is gifted to Rachel Verinder on her 18th birthday. But the moonstone is cursed, and its theft the same night scatters the assembled company and begins what GK Chesterton called "probably the best detective tale in the world".
The Moonstone epitomises the late-Victorian vogue for sensationalist crime fiction, and pioneered a number of now classic detective novel conventions, including the disarmingly affable antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, Sergeant Cuff. Modelled on Mr Whicher, Cuff was, to TS Eliot, "the perfect detective… brilliant without being infallible".
Collins is adept at conjuring both character and atmosphere, from the "Shivering Sands" (quicksand on the Yorkshire coast) to the series of narrators who take turns to tell the tale and to suffer the benign mockery of their creator: among them Gabriel Betteredge, the pompous retainer with an unshakable faith in the consolations of Robinson Crusoe, and Franklin Blake, Rachel's dashing cousin, hamstrung by a dangerously continental education.
Collins was both a friend and protege of Dickens, and shared his fondness for social causes: he reserves a more caustic wit for the iniquities of "Companies in the City" and vapid celebrity culture. More poignant is the novel's exposition on the psychological effects of opium, which foreshadows Collins's own dependency.
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