Wilkie Collins

The first modern detective story, The Woman in White is a thrilling mystery that continues to shock even today. Debuting the archetypical elements of the genre, including mysterious apparitions, illegitimacy, mistaken identities, unreliable narrators, drugs, and crimes of passion, this intricate novel presents a thrilling quest for the truth and love. This Penguin Hardcover classic features cover art of light blue birds over a dark navy blue cloth cover.

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Wilkie Collins' classic is considered the very first English detective novel. Given a large diamond on her 18th birthday, it sets off a string of bad luck for Rachel Verrinder. Stolen that very night, suspicion falls on a number of people-until a gifted amateur discovers what the local constables could not. 438 pages, softcover.

T. S. Eliot famously described The Moonstone as the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels, but as Sandra Kemp discusses in her Introduction, it offers many other facets, which reveal Collins's sensibilities as untypical of his era. His women and servants--like the luckless Rosanna--are trated as individuals capable of anger and passion. He unmasks a restrictive society in his depiction of sexual and imperial domination. Finally through his manipulation of the narrative itself, facts, identities and memory become question marks. With constantly shifting perspectives, the marvellously intricate mystery of the Moonstone unfolds.

The Moonstone was published in 1868 and concerns a huge yellow diamond that was once stolen from an Indian shrine. Rachel Verrinder receives the stone as a gift and does not realize that it has been passed on to her as a sinister form of revenge by John Herncastle who acquired the moonstone by means of murder and theft. The jewel seems to bring bad luck to all who possess it. The stone then ends up disappearing on the same night it was acquired! The plot thickens as the story goes on to unravel the mystery and unveil the culprit.