Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In 1799, amid the storming of Seringapatam, an English officer takes a great yellow diamond from an Indian palace. Nearly fifty years later the stone crosses the threshold of a quiet Yorkshire country house as an eighteenth-birthday gift. Before morning it has vanished from a locked room, leaving behind a smear of paint, a household full of suspicion, and one young woman who refuses to explain what she knows.

Wilkie Collins built The Moonstone as a sequence of testimonies. The loyal steward Gabriel Betteredge tells what he saw; the formidable Miss Clack tells rather more than anyone asked; lawyers, doctors, travellers and servants each add a piece. Their voices disagree, correct one another and expose their own blind spots. The reader does not simply watch an investigation — the reader assembles it.

First published in 1868 and set chiefly in 1848, the novel helped establish the grammar of modern detective fiction: the country-house mystery, the celebrated investigator, the apparently impossible theft, the physical clue hidden in plain sight and the reconstruction of a lost night. Yet its deepest interest lies in memory, loyalty and the damage caused when certainty arrives before understanding.

This illustrated edition opens the doors of the Verinder estate, maps the road from India to Yorkshire and London, and introduces the witnesses without revealing the answer they pursue. The six visual movements below will unlock only after the relevant portion of the record has been read. Begin with the family paper from Seringapatam, and judge each voice by what it can — and cannot — see.