PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Wilkie (William) Collins (1824-89) was a hugely successful and popular crime, mystery and suspense writer. He wrote the first full-length detective novels in English and set a mould for the genre as shown in THE MOONSTONE and 'The Woman in White'. Sandra Kemp has edited Virginia Woolf's short stories and Rudyard Kipling's 'Debits and Credits' for Penguin
An emormous diamond is bequeathed to Miss Rachel Verinder by her uncle Colonel John Herncastle who has recently expired out in the colonies. In anticipation of Miss Verinders eighteenth birthday , the Moonstone is spirited out of India and brought back to England whereupon it goes missing. Stolen in the first place from a Hindu shrine, the ownership and indeed the whereabouts of the sacred diamond is the question around which the plot revolves. Credited with being the first example of detective fiction the tale is told as a series of eyewitness accounts which was partly necessitated by it being published by instalment in All Year Round in 1868. (Kirkus UK)
