Detective Story
REASSESSMENT
By PATRICK ANDERSON
wILKIE COLLINS'S The Moonstone,* the story of the theft of an already stolen diamond from a young girl on whom it has been bestowed with ambiguous intent, is a novel of many virtues. For one thing, it is enormously readable; it succeeds in balancing liberal doses of suspense with the leisurely and soothing quality of Vic- torian three-volume fiction, so that the reader finds himself now almost digressively lingering over character and social comment and now propelled thrillingly forward in a kind of sub- marine world where the light is continually shifting and cave is succeeded by cave. Its struc- ture is that of the accumulation of points of view, each expressive of a particular per- sonality, with no character free from his human share of faults and fallibilities—good old family-retainer Betteredge limited and pre- judiced, Rachel Verinder tempestuously head- strong, and the hero, if that term can be applied to Franklin Blake, a jobless, vaguely artistic rolling stone who has been less than careful in matters of money and 'unmentionable' women. Even the detective, the sad, sardonic Sergeant Cuff, only gets at half the truth before he is dismissed from the case.
For The Moonstone is, of course, a pioneer amongst detective stories. In his introduction, Mr J. I. M. Stewart explains that its technical 'primitiveness' allows greater play to the values and interests of ordinary fiction: characters can be established more strongly than in works where suspicion must play equally upon every- one concerned. One sees his point, but can only take it as a criticism of the absurdly ingenious, and ultimately boring, twists and turns of a Perry Mason. Suspicion admittedly does not fall on everyone present at Rachel's birthday party on June 21, 1848; the suspects number no more than five or six; but it is certainly the least likely people who get the blame, for the first astonish- ing revelation is that Rachel must have stolen her own jewel and the second implicates (in one sense correctly) the very man who has called the detectives in, continued their inquiries on his own and finally encouraged the various reports which form the book.
One is grateful for Sergeant Cuff, a detective hired from Scotland Yard (which was then apparently the custom), who is admirably thorough, spots the crucial bit of evidence, cheoks the laundry-list and wishes to search the boxes and wardrobes of everyone, both servants and gentry, for the paint-smeared garment—
Collins based his story on a real case and an actual detective, for he was always scrupulous about documentation. He gives Cuff a hobby as contrapuntal as Sherlock Holmes's violin and endows him with that world-weary, half-bitter compassion which was so much the point of Z Cars.
But one is equally glad that various amateurs take over when Rachel's refusal to have her
room searched blocks the official inquiry, the lawyer Bruff providing one element in the final denouement, the mysterious Ezra Jennings, with his modern-sounding psychological experiment,
the other. At one point Gabriel Betteredge speaks of a detective-fever, 'an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach . . . and a nasty thumping at the top of your head,' and, although • THE MOONSTONF. By Wilkie Collins. (Penguin English Library, 6s.) others are less ingenuously involved, it is this curiosity which runs through the book. It is, I think, a curiosity about people, about the enig- matic incidents and attitudes which prevent Rachel Verinder and Franklin Blake coming to. gether, so that at one time Rachel becomes engaged to the appallingly handsome and smooth-tongued Godfrey Ablewhite. As such it enlists more of our attention than a bishop gives to the intellectual game of his bedside whodunit The oddity of The Moonstone is that the diamond itself scarcely matters, except as catalyst or symbol. Rachel Verinder is unin- terested in jewels; she and her mother are rich anyway; and it seems clear that Lady Verinder plans to get rid of the thing as soon as the birthday celebrations are over.
The Moonstone, 'a famous gem in the native annals of India,' was preserved when the shrine it adorned was pillaged in the eleventh century, being subsequently guarded by three Brahmins from generation to generation. Finally lost to the Moslems at the time of Aurungzebe, later in the possession of Tippoo Sultan, and finally snatched at the expense of triple murder by Lady Verinder's 'wicked brother' at the fall of Seringapatam, it brought to England not only its curse but also the skulking figures of its dispossessed guardians. Thus the story opens. It closes with a description in Collins's most romantic vein of the jewel's return to the home it had left eight centuries before, as reported by the traveller, Murthwaite: 'the view pre- sented the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen.' To Betteredge it is an object of unearthly beauty: `The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon.' Thanks to the air of intelligence pervading the novel, this jewel (which nobody really wants) seems to liberate and to hold in suspension material of very considerable complexity. It suggests an exotic reality quite out- side the normal Victorian way of life.
The novel contains little of Christianity and less, for all its rich and titled people, of class. Miss Clack, the 'Rampant Spinster,' is an object of savage ridicule with her long-suffering postures and her distribution of tracts; a Ser• vant is treated sympathetically when she falls in love with the hero himself and both Penelope Betteredge and Limping Lucy Yolland are allowed as much spirit as Rachel Verinder. Finally, it is Ezra Jennings, almost universal]) disliked for his extraordinary appearance (pie- bald hair and gipsy complexion), who attains a kind of saintliness, not least because of his display of what we would now call psychiatric knowledge. Ezra, with his foreign blood, and perhaps even the wicked Colonel Herncastle (who, if the bequest of the diamond cannot bring him revenge, wants it split up to endow a Chair of Experimental Chemistry in the North), represent a reality almost 'Indian' in it transcendence of British norms.
Drusilla Clack may be a caricature, Franklin Blake may insufficiently demonstrate his cos' mopolitanism; one may quibble with a pool here and there—didn't Rachel's door have 3 lock?, why didn't Betteredge ask to see the moonstone on his first meeting with Franklir, Blake?—but it is all magnificent entertainment' splendidly written, and with implications of a curiously Forsterian kind as well.
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