Before Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes and Adam Dalgliesh. Before Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. The first full-length detective novel ever published was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. First serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round, the story revolves around the theft of a precious stone. A diamond, actually, not a semi-precious moonstone. The title page of the first edition [below] shows the publisher as Tinsley Brothers, Catherine Street, The Strand, London in 1868. 
The story
On her 18th birthday, Rachel Verinder inherits a large Indian diamond as a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army officer serving in India. However the diamond is not only valuable but has great religious significance, and so three Hindu priests dedicate their lives to recovering it. At her birthday party Rachel wears the Moonstone on her dress for all to see. Later the same night, the diamond is stolen. The Moonstone follows the attempts of Rachel’s cousin Franklin Blake to identify the thief, trace the stone and recover it.
The first edition
Of course there are many ‘first editions’ and not all date from the original publication, they may simply be the first printing by a particular publisher. Although I could find online a first edition of Collins’ The Woman in White, dated 1860 and costing £2,500, I could find no similar edition of The Moonstone. I wonder where they are and who owns them? Fans of crime fiction? 
This first edition dates to 1959 and was published in the USA by the New York Heritage Press. George Macy’s Heritage Press reprinted classic volumes previously published by the more exclusive Limited Editions Club. Bound in red Morocco leather and including colour lithographs, it costs £450 at rare bookseller Peter Harrington.
The current UK edition
There are many editions of The Moonstone now listed at Amazon, many are self-published and take advantage of the lack of copyright. Above is the current Penguin Classics edition.
The films
There have been many television, radio and film adaptations, including in 1997 a BBC/Carlton TV production featuring Greg Wise as Franklin Blake and Keeley Hawes as Rachel Verinder. Watch at You Tube below.
Watch the trailer here for the most recent BBC mini-series in 2016 [below].
Other editions
Cover designs for older editions of The Moonstone tend to be romanticized, often featuring details from larger classical paintings.
My copy of The Moonstone [below] is a Penguin Popular Classics edition dating back to 1994. The cover shows a detail of ‘The Honeymoon’ by Alfred Joseph Woolmer [below]. 
‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins [UK: Penguin Classics] Buy now
If you like old books, check out these:-
‘Watership Down’ by Richard Adams
‘The Sea The Sea’ by Iris Murdoch
‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ by John Fowles
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
First Edition: THE MOONSTONE by Wilkie Collins #oldbooks via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2sF
My favourite is ‘The Roses’. Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.
What if you discovered that everything you knew about yourself was a lie?
This hardback first edition, signed by the author, also features an inscription. Published by Chatto & Windus in 1978, the inscription is to Martyn Goff, administrator of the Booker Prize from the early 1970-2005. The distinctive cover features ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai.
The film Iris was released in 2001. Murdoch was played in youth and old age by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, her husband John Bayley was played by Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent. About their lifelong romance and then the sad descent of Iris into dementia. Watch the official trailer here.
Still in print as a Vintage Classic edition, this is the current cover. 
My Triad Granada edition [above] features on its cover a detail of a painting, ‘The Sea-Birds Domain’ by Peter Graham, which can be seen in Manchester Art Gallery. It is dated inside in my handwriting as being bought in 1984.
“To be honest, I have more than one ‘Porridge and Cream’ book, and they’re all quite different, but the book I’d happily pick up when feeling ill or run down is Joanne Harris’ Chocolat – a delicious and delightful character-driven novel centred around single mother and chocolatier Vianne Rocher and her young daughter, Anouk. I first read it over a summer, not long after it had been published, so around 2000 or 2001. I’d recently moved in with my boyfriend (now husband) and we’d been to Greece together to meet his parents and the whole of his extended Greek family, so a book set in a French village that immersed its characters in local life with the focus being on food and delicious chocolate creations resonated with me and my first experiences of a Greek family and their abundance of delicious food.
Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full.
The story
The story
Watch this clip on You Tube, the scene where Smithson first sees Woodruff standing on The Cobb [above] on a wild and windy day. Filmed on location in Dorset.
So I’m going with another choice: Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos – a book I love so much I named one of my characters after the author. I studied it at university in the 90s (it’s one of the few books I’ve read in French and English, back when I was capable of reading more than a menu in French!). The edition I prefer is the Penguin Classic, translated by PWK Stone. I probably go back to it every couple of years, more if I’m prompted by seeing the film on TV. I usually give myself long enough to forget the intricacies of the plot (which is far more complicated and satisfying than the movie) so I can enjoy its richness again. It’s a book to read when I want to be amused and distracted but perhaps a little more stimulated than when I turn to Pratchett (as I’ve read his so many times they nourish me, but all blur into one another slightly!).
It isn’t easy to surprise Cassandra Bick. When you run a human-vampire dating agency, your colleague is a witch who is engaged to a shifter and your business partner is one of London’s most powerful (and sexiest) vampires, there’s no such thing as a normal day at the office. But when a mysterious Dark Dates client brings a dire warning of a new threat to the city’s supernatural community, Cass and her friends realise they are up against their deadliest foe yet – and that this time, the danger is far closer to home than they could ever have imagined.
