The Moonstone

A tale considered by many to be the greatest ever written.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone.

Our star, Mr. Peter Lawford.

That's next week on Suspense.

Featured in tonight's cast were Joseph Kearns, Jack Prussian, Ben Wright, Steve Roberts, David Young, Bert Holland, and Ted Bliss.

William Holden will shortly be seen co-starring with Ginger Rogers and Paul Douglas in Paramount's new comedy, Forever Female.

And remember, next week, Mr. Peter Lawford in part one of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.

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It could be his own adventure We don't really need homes to do this and you know when I was reading the story I was I was thinking of Wilkie Collins.

You know, you read things like The Moonstone or The Woman in White and they are these Victorian romps.

I'll tell you what was a great book.

Quincunx by, what's his name, Palliser, which was a pastiche.

Mr. Wilkie Collins is responsible for the amazing hotchpotch.

What do you say? He asks in The Moonstone.

What do you say when our county member, growing hot at cheese and salad time, about the spread of democracy in England, burst out as follows? If we once lose our ancient safeguards, Mr.

Blake, I beg to ask you, what have we got left? And what do you say to Mr.

A. Hentykind, and then the better type of adventure stories, such as Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines.

Then I drifted into Wilkie Collins' creations, reading only the more exciting ones, The Moonstone and The Dead Alive.

after that came edgar allan poe and charles reade and before i was sixteen i had gotten to scott thackeray and dickens and here i anchored since then of course i have voyaged far and wide in all directions but dickens is my snug harbor and will be to the end no boy could revel shall i say wallow in trashy literature more than i did but search as i will i cannot see where it left a trace of an influence on my conduct or my character i do not think it was owing to any want of physical courage because i know that i did my share of fighting and took as many beatings with a dry eye as the others a little more of both in fact than it would become me to boast about but i never robbed a bank or had any desire to i never craved the career of a detective keenly enough to try my hand at it and while at one time i did yearn for a chance to battle single-handed with a band of sioux warriors the desire never led me into more dangerous quarters than a seat at the wild west show was i different from other boys my mother says certainly i was and very much better god bless her my father says i was about like the rest my teacher he is a prominent member of the new york bar now and i put the question to him squarely just the other day tells me frankly that i was the worst boy in school the three estimates averaged would make me an average boy and i think my experience as to the effect of reading material was about the usual experience of boys in general They pass through the age of blood-and-thunder literature just as they have mumps, measles, and marbles, and are none the better and but little the worse for having gone through it.

As water finds its level, so the temperament eventually finds its affinity in reading matter.

Yes, one of these days, please God, I shall retire from catching thieves and try my hand at growing roses.

Wilkie Collins wrote that in the book The Moonstone.

Did you ever read The

Moonstone?

I don't think I did.

So

The Moonstone is

about 971 pages.

Well, be-

In fact, I like The Moonstone too.

Absolutely, but The Woman in White is, there's much more kind of an-

Yeah

And to understand how a puzzle achieves this kind of perfection, we really have to start with the foundational blueprint, right? The book that essentially built the machine, everyone else is still driving.

Yeah, we are starting in 1868 with The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

T.S. Eliot famously called this the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.

High praise.

I want to challenge that right out of the gate.

Yeah.

Because when you look at the structure of the Moonstone, where the crime is recounted through the diaries and letters of multiple different characters.

Like the House Steward Betteridge or Miss Clack.

Both were keen to test out the possibilities of using the new detectives in a novel.

Dickens wrote Bleak House in 1852, and Collins wrote his masterpiece The Moonstone in 1868.

Collins' detective in that novel is called Sergeant Cuff.

Sergeant Cuff, perhaps not unsurprisingly, has many similarities with Dickens' Inspector Bucket.

that Dickens tragically died halfway through the writing of it and left the question tantalizingly unanswered, an eternally unsolved fictional crime.

Wilkie Collins, on the other hand, was a sensational writer, relying on shock and mystery for his plots, which regularly featured characters who utilised detection methods, though not actually being detectives.

When Collins published The Moonstone in 1868, the public's attitude had changed.

towards detectives, and with other writers following where Dickens had led, the craze for fictional detective stories was increasing exponentially, and The Moonstone was a smash hit, being translated into many languages.

We did some Poe, and obviously the early Sherlock Holmes is, you know, late 19th century stuff.

We did The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

I don't...

I can't remember, Josh, did that predate the Poe stuff we did, the Wilkie Collins?

I could be wrong, 'cause I know they were very close to each other because I think we kind of lumped them in.

I, I believe because we did the, that collection of, like, the three Poe stories, right? Like Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Disappearance of the Girl, or what- what have you, and I forget what the other one's called.

But, um, then we did The Moonstone, I, I believe.

I think that's how it went.