Moonstone

Re-read for my lecture on mid-Victorian representations of colonial India this past week, and let me tell you that The Moonstone is everything that your Victorianist friends have been talking about for ages. By the time you're through Gabriel Betteredge's narrative, you are hooked! There is no escaping. My favourite scene (obviously): Opium and the re-enactment! The novel is also the origin point for many of detective fiction's foundational tropes: bunging local policeman, prodigal brooding city cop, poor maid with the stained dress wrongly accused for the crime, digressive polyvocal narrative, the found document, and so on!