The Moonstone

A diamond taken from an Indian shrine is left to a girl on her eighteenth birthday and vanishes from her sitting-room that night, and eleven witnesses tell the story in turn. T. S. Eliot called it the first and best English detective novel. Collins wrote most of it under laudanum for gout, and afterwards did not recognize parts of what he had dictated. Fifty-seven plates spanning 1820 to 1906, among them Millais and Ethel Walker, gather moonlit ruins, rivers and shadowed interiors that suit a tale of a stolen diamond and eleven shifting testimonies.