The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
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The Moonstone

Author: Wilkie Collins

Narrator: Doushu

Unabridged: 20 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HongMei Zhou

Published: 04/24/2026


Synopsis

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is widely recognized as the very first detective novel in the English language, a masterpiece that laid the foundation for an entire genre.
This riveting tale begins with a priceless yellow diamond, the Moonstone, stolen from an Indian shrine by a British officer. He bequeaths the cursed gem to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her eighteenth birthday. But that very night, the diamond vanishes from her room.
What follows is a labyrinthine mystery of false leads, suspicious servants, and a shadowy band of Indian jugglers seemingly bent on recovering the relic. To solve the case, the family turns to the brilliant but eccentric Sergeant Cuff, a master of deduction who would set the template for detectives to come.
Told through a series of captivating first-person narratives—from the loyal family steward to a love-struck housemaid and a pious, nosy cousin—the novel builds a rich and immersive picture of Victorian life. More than a mere puzzle, The Moonstone is also a sharp social commentary, remembered for its sympathetic portrayal of servants and its surprisingly respectful depiction of other cultures.
T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels." Experience the book that started it all.
This audiobook is based on the 1868 public domain text.

About Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist who critics often credit with the invention of the English detective novel. Sergeant Cuff from Collins's novel The Moonstone became a prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Collins's works center on mainstream Victorian domestic life. Collins liked to tackle social issues, and many of his novels contain sympathetic portraits of physically abnormal individuals. In addition to Moonstone, he is well known for his popular suspense thriller The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale.

Collins was born in London in 1824 to William Collins, a well-known landscape painter, and Harriet Collins, the daughter of a painter. Despite a secure home, he was a small, sickly child and had a slightly deformed skull. He was educated privately and studied painting for several years. He later studied law and became a lawyer at the age of twenty-seven. Collins never practiced law, but he did put his legal knowledge to work in his crime writing.

In 1851, Collins met his lifelong friend and mentor Charles Dickens while they were pursuing a mutual interest in amateur theater. Dickens helped Collins bring humor and believable characters into his books.The two women in Collins's life-Caroline Graves, his life-long companion, and Mrs. Martha Rudd, his mistress-also greatly influenced his writing.

During the 1860s, Collins started to suffer severely from rheumatic pains and became addicted to laudanum, a form of opium. The death of Dickens in 1870 robbed him of his powerful inspiration, and his popularity declined. In 1873, he met Mark Twain and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on a trip to the United States. Soon thereafter he wrote The Evil Genius, which was published in 1886. Collins died from a stroke on September 23, 1889.


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