Where to start, really? :) I guess most of you are familiar with Wilkie Collins and his mother of all modern English detective stories The Moonstone. I finally read it and, to put it simply, I totally loved the book! Five bright stars for this one!
William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London and lived most of his life not far from Oxford Street. His father was a succesful painter, his mother a teacher and an actress. Theirs was a happy marriage and young Wilkie, their first born, had a secure home. He and his siblings were encouraged to read and to paint from an early age. The Collins family also travelled in different parts of Britain and even spent two years in Italy. All this helped to develop Wilkie's imagination.
It seems that Wilkie knew quite early that he wanted to become a writer. His father, however, tried to steer his interests towards a more practical occupation by getting him a job as a clerk at a tea-importer's company. Later his father helped Wilkie towards a career in Law. In 1852 Wilkie Collins passed his final law exams, but he never worked in the profession. He used his knowledge of the law in his writing, though.
The first work Wilkie Collins got published was a short story called The Last Stage Coachman that appeared in a magazine in 1843. His first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850 and was well received by the critics.
Wilkie Collins was good friends with Charles Dickens. They travelled together and many of Wilkie's novels were published in serial form in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Dickens.
Wilkie Collins' domestic arrangements were rather unusual. For a long time he was in a relationship with two women, but did not marry either one of them.
The Moonstone is one of the two most well-known novels by Collins, the other being The Woman in White. I reread The Women in White 2010 & love it, but somehow it took me this long to read anything else by Collins. Boy am I happy that I finally did! The Moonstone is a detective story about the theft of a priceless Indian diamond told in multiple voices of different degrees of credibility. The plot is nicely intricate and the narrators are absolutely fabulous, if I may use such a word in this context! :) My two favorite narrators were Mr. Betteredge (of course! :)) and Miss Clack (surprisingly, but I really loved the way Collins had disguised humour in that insufferable woman's words! ). The main characters, Rachel Verinder, who has just got the diamond as a birthday present, when it disappears, and Franklin Blake, who is in love with Rachel, did actually not touch me so much, but that was only because of Mr. Betteredge's narration set the tone for my whole reading experience and I kept waiting, whether there would be more about him later in the story! (There was :))
The Moonstone was a joy to read from the first page to the last and I must say it should be required reading for anyone who likes a good mystery! So, run, run, run to the library near you to get a copy, if you haven't read it yet! :)
I count The Moonstone towards both The Back to the Classics & The TBR Pile challenges.
