The Moonstone

⚖The case for it

T.S. Eliot considered it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels." Collins introduced multiple narrators, forensic detection, crime scene investigation, the medical analysis; the entire apparatus of the modern mystery. Still supremely readable 150 years on.

— the canon

✕The case against

Victorian serial pacing means everything happens twice and gets discussed three times. Miss Clack's narration is a joke that runs forty pages past funny, the Indians are furniture from the imperial prop room, and the solution hinges on laudanum-induced sleepwalking, a device you accept as period charm or you don't.

— the honest librarian