A relatively common question in crime fiction circles is the identity of the "first ever" crime novel. Just as with many other notable "firsts", this is a question almost impossible to answer. People have been committing crimes in literature almost forever, and other people have been investigating them with varying degrees of success for just about as long.
One candidate for the first "Detective Fiction" novel, though, is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Collins was a writer of the sort of Gothic-Melodrama which Victorian literature is full of - his earlier The Woman In White is often listed as a perfect example of that genre, as well as a relatively early thriller. Collins was a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens, who published many of his early novels in his magazines. Indeed, my first exposure to Collins came courtesy of Dan Simmons' brilliant horror novel Drood, in which an opium-addled Collins (who took vast amounts of laudanum in real life) serves as narrator for a series of thoroughly unnerving events happening to both authors.
The Moonstone is, in many ways, an early detective story. We're given the customary "Golden Age" setting - large country house with a decent collection of servants as well as family members of what even Agatha Christie would refer to as "independent means", mysterious strangers, and so on - and a crime happens. The crime is investigated by the local police, to no real avail, before Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery.
Where this then differs from what would become the "pattern" of detective fiction is that Cuff doesn't get the chance to solve the crime. At least, while he seems relatively certain of the criminal's identity, there is no gathering of everyone in the drawing room and the gradual unravelling of the mystery. Instead, the characters leave the estate under assorted clouds of suspicion and seem to do most of their own unravelling over a period of nearly another year.
What is also unusual here is that the crime isn't a murder, but rather a robbery of a gemstone - the titular one. While it's entirely possible to write crime fiction around almost any kind of crime (Sherlock Holmes, for example, investigated several burglaries, any number of kidnappings, assorted blackmailings and frauds as well as his more famous murders), murders tend to dominate novel-length detective fiction, albeit with other crimes involved as well (the murder during a robbery or because of blackmail, for example, is a relatively common crime).
The reasons for this seem to be that murder is simply more dramatic than most other crimes. The psychology of someone willing to kill someone else to achieve a given end is alien to - I would hope - most of us, and therefore much more interesting. Additionally, while a burglar can burgle any number of times, there's a lot more drama in the fact that "a killer is on the loose". Think of the number of murder mysteries which are enlivened by more than one death or even an attempt being made on the hero's life as well.
Collins' choice of robbery was of course made before a lot of these sorts of "rules" were established, and I should point out that the robbery leads to both a suicide and a murder, so the tension does escalate over the course of the plot. Additionally, given that he was writing for a Victorian audience, we have to remember that different sensibilities were in play. Yes, stories and novels existed glorifying all manner of criminals, but murder was certainly seen as a very heinous event at this time.
The other quirk of the novel, particularly in our time, is the handling of Sergeant Cuff - who was based, it seems, on the very famous Inspector Whitcher (see The Suspicions of Mr Whitcher), who had only recently been involved in the "Road Murder" which brought him considerable fame.
Cuff is essentially hired from the police force to investigate the robbery and then comes close on several occasions to being sacked and paid off when his investigations cut close to the bone. This makes very little sense these days, but the concept of professional "detective police" was still very new in the mid-1800s and the force's members were handled in precisely this way by those with the means to do so. Various exchanges among the characters also go to the fact that the police were seen as professional snoops with very low morals - in keeping with their antecedents as "Thief Takers" and so on.
Cuff is very clearly a "modern" fictional detective, though. His disdain for the methods of the local police is a clear antecedent of everyone from Sherlock Holmes on down, and his willingness to speak elliptically when explaining the significance of various clues sounds very much like Hercule Poirot and his spiritual successors as well.
Interesting though The Moonstone is, it doesn't work quite so well as crime fiction because of Collins' focus on the supporting cast. The best crime novels put the plot first and the characters marginally second (which is why we know a reasonable amount about the private lives of Hercule Poirot, Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but almost nothing about Chief Inspectors Japp or Lestrade who deal with them). Such character development as there is can come over a series of novels, for example, with most of the individual novel focused on the crime and its investigation.
Collins, writing from the Victorian standpoint, puts the characters well in advance of the plot. They are definitely believable characters - and in fact this is an epistolary novel, so there are several voices and most of them ring true. Two of the main figures, the servant Gabriel Betteredge and young Franklin Blake, are very well-drawn and their slightly differing views of the same events are a clever quirk of the novel. The extended section written by Miss Clack, a puritanical relative of some of the characters, is amusing in parts, although it perhaps goes on for too long.
All too often, though, we get lost in the minute details of the characters' lives, rather than the investigation of the fate of the Moonstone. This may be because the actual mechanics of the stone's robbery are rather uninspired (the reason for the robbery is interesting, but only lightly touched on, again most likely for reasons of the intended audience). The revelations, when they come, seem to be more of an afterthought than the reason for reading the novel in the first place.
In the end, this isn't a bad novel, taken purely as a novel with incidental crime fiction elements. Viewed as "the first English-language detective novel", it's also of more than historical significance. I can only give it a guarded recommendation, though, as what came after it took this template and expanded on it considerably.
2.5 stars.
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