The second is that Collins was a Victorian.

Small surprise the book contains extraordinary nightmare visions. He said his dreams were haunted by “phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies alike”, while in his waking hours the screams of pain were said to be so dreadful that a secretary he employed to take dictation of the novel fled in terror. Perhaps understandably, he took laudanum for the pain, becoming so addicted that he later claimed he could barely recall composing the book. The first is that Collins suffered dreadfully from rheumatic gout, which reports said made his eyes look like “enormous bags of blood”.

There are, however, a few things worth knowing at the outset. It’s such a fine story that I don’t want to say too much before we get started. Not least because the great Dorothy L Sayers ( who knew something about the genre herself) agreed, and labelled it: “probably the very finest detective story ever written”. Harder to dispute is Eliot’s other claim – that The Moonstone was the “longest and best” detective novel. But there’s no doubt that Sergeant Cuff, the man who unravels The Moonstone’s mystery, set the template for many of the literary detectives that followed. There’s some controversy as to whether Collins can really stake claim to the invention of the genre, since he was writing more than 25 years after Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. If we are to believe one TS Eliot, the book is the “first. Reading it today, it’s easy to understand that fever of expectation, but there’s also the added fascination of historical curiosity. William Tinsey, who published The Moonstone in book form, reported crowds of “anxious readers” waiting around his office, as well as “several” bets being taken on the book’s eventual outcome. It’s 150 years this August since Collins wrapped up the story which he had been publishing in instalments in the periodical All the Year Round – having kept readers hanging on since January to learn the great secret at the heart of the book.

The moonstone novel