Audiobook · read by volunteers
Moonstone
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)
Read by Mike Gardom, Lee Ann Howlett, Graham Redman, Gesine, J. M. Smallheer, Kristine Bekere, Joel Poortenga, Justin Brett · 48 chapters · 20 h 08
About the book
On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder is given a magnificent Indian diamond, the Moonstone. That same night, it vanishes. The loss touches off an investigation that draws in a celebrated detective, a household of servants, rival suitors, a mysterious band of Indian visitors and a remarkable assortment of witnesses, each of whom tells the story from a different point of view. Wilkie Collins builds his plot with great patience, adding red herrings, secrets and reversals, and the result is a novel that many consider the ancestor of the modern detective story. The voices are vivid, from a devoted old steward to a pious and meddling spinster, and the mystery keeps its grip over many hours. With forty-eight sections and some twenty hours of listening, this is a classic to settle into, and to savour.
Introduction
Wilkie Collins lived from 1824 to 1889. He was a close friend of Charles Dickens, with whom he collaborated on magazine work, and he became one of the most popular novelists of Victorian England. His fame rests chiefly on two books, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which first appeared in 1868 and was originally published in instalments before coming out as a volume.
The novel is widely regarded as a forerunner of the modern mystery and suspense story. T. S. Eliot described it as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels". It contains a number of devices that later became staples of the genre: a large group of suspects, false clues, and a crime investigated by capable amateurs as well as a professional policeman. Its structure is also unusual. Instead of a single narrator, Collins uses a series of witnesses, each writing an account of the part of events he or she knows, which gives the book a variety of tones and lets him play with the reliability of every voice.
This LibriVox recording was made by volunteers who share the reading. It is divided into forty-eight sections, beginning with a prologue, and runs to just over twenty hours.
Why listen today? Because the book is a model of how to sustain suspense over a very long story. Its plot is intricate, its characters are memorable, and it also has something to say about empire, class and the ways that objects carry history with them.
Public domain
Wilkie Collins died in 1889: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text