The Moonstone

Just as The Woman in White is considered one of the first suspense novels, so is Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone considered the first detective novel.  Unfortunately, although I really liked the former, I didn't really like The Moonstone.  Caveat lector: I've only read the first 2/3 of The Moonstone; I didn't like it enough to finish.

Maybe if I had read The Moonstone first, I'd have liked it more.  The epistolary style feels much fresher in The Woman in White than in The Moonstone.  But I'm not sure that's entirely because I read the former first; The Woman in White has more formal innovation, including extracts from a diary, a grave marker, and so on, whereas The Moonstone only has straightforward 1st person narrative.

But I'm not really looking for formal innovation in a Victorian novel.  I think the bigger problem is that The Moonstone doesn't have any really interesting characters, except possibly Detective Cuff, who barely shows up.  Wilkie Collins showed that he could create a strong female character in Marian Holcomb.  But Rachel, who is supposed to be strong-minded in the same way, comes off as merely spoiled.

She knows a good deal about the crime, but won't tell anyone what she knows.  This is bad enough, but Collins has all the other characters (except Cuff) basically shrug and say, "Rachel says that so-and-so is innocent, so that's good enough for me."  I think this is actually pretty patronizing; it's hard to imagine them doing the same for a male character.  More than that, it rings fairly hollow to me -- I would think that in real life, she'd get pressed pretty hard by her family (not to mention the family lawyer) to tell what she knows.

Really, I think that it's not a very good novel.  Instead, it's the sort of book that gave mysteries a bad name for decades -- contrived and plot-driven.