In the 1860s a new literary genre emerged. Shocking and too much to take for some (one critic described the genre as 'unspeakably disgusting') the sensation novel peered beneath the genteel and eminently respectable veneer of Victorian life to to reveal a world full of bigamy, madness, murder and violence.
Wilkie Collins was the best known author of this shocking new literary genre. The Moonstone is an elaborate tale of mystery and intrigue centred around a fabulous diamond, looted from a Hindu shrine, and the curse it brings on those in possession of it. The Moonstone contains all the essential ingredients of Victorian sensationalist fiction. Collins was addicted to laudanum and opium weaves its way through the narrative alongside the Victorian obsessions with India, crime and the dark arts.
Arguably in The Moonstone Collins created the first whodunit, a genre in which authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers would make their names. It is in this book that Collins establishes many of the conventions of the English detective novel; a country house setting, a large number of loosely related suspects (all with secrets of their own), a renowned detective and, of course, liberal amounts of red herrings.
I had originally started to read a battered paperback copy that my dad bought secondhand in 1970 but as it was only held together with forty year old sellotape I abandoned it amid fears it would disintegrate completely before I could finish it. Instead I opted for a more robust hardback I found in the library which probably owes its good condition to lack of reading than good care.
Shame really as I really enjoyed this book. It may have been scandalous for the Victorians but for the C.S.I. generation it's pretty tame fare. The appeal of the book, to me anyway, is the tight plotting and the evocative picture it creates, completely unintentionally, of Victorian England.
Read On: No Name by Wilkie Collins
Other works of Victorian sensationalist fiction include; Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Bleak House by Charles Dickens; and Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu.
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