The Moonstone Legacy: A Gothic Trope

Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) has left Mystery and Horror fiction a legacy trope. This is the idea of the terrible revenge out of the East. In Collins’ novel, John Herncastle, a British soldier in India, brutally murders three Brahmin and steals the title gem. About fifty years later the stone will be central to a Mystery that ends well with the good guys getting married and the stone returned to India. This novel is a key volume in the history of the Mystery, which was in its infancy when Collins (and his friend, Charles Dickens) enjoyed the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Dorothy L. Sayers called it “probably the very finest detective story ever written”.

Sherlock Holmes

Whether you agree with that or not, the book was influential. Arthur Conan Doyle certainly had it in mind when he wrote the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (The Strand, July 1893). In that story a man named Henry Wood was in India during the Rebellion of 1857 but returns as a cripple after horrible tortures. His former lover doesn’t recognize him. The plot doesn’t involve a fabulous gem but the trope is already here. A terrible thing happens in the East and comes to England for retribution.

One of the elements of Gothic fiction is the past tries to destroy the future. In the very first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole, this took the form of the old baron, Manfred, wanting to marry the young, Isabella against her will. She runs about the castle until she meets the true heir of Otranto and the bad guy meets his end. This idea is the core of many Mystery and Horror stories. In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902),  it is an old legend of a phantom hound coming for the heir of Baskerville. (As well as the other heir, Stapleton, whose family was wronged long ago getting his due.) In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), it is an ancient terror come to England to destroy beautiful women like Mina Harker.

Agatha Christie

And in tales like The Moonstone, it is a wrong done far away coming to be corrected on the shores old England. The appeal of this trope is not hard to see in the Victorian Age. Colonialism in Africa, Asia, North America and Australia gave England great wealth but also subconscious guilt. This trope acknowledges the guilt but usually ends with a happy ending, the jewel returned, the lovers married, all set right again. The Gothic cancer has been excised.

Agatha Christie, writing some of her first Hercule Poirot tales used The Moonstone trope to her advantage in “The Adventure of the Western Star”. The actress Miss Mary Marvell and Lady Yardly possess two gems reportedly from the eyes of a Chinese idol. When both plan to wear these gems at an event Mary gets letters warning her off. The letters do not frighten Miss Marvell so much as that: “… they were left by hand — by a Chinaman …” Poirot is hired to protect the gems and unfolds a plot that doesn’t involve any one of Chinese background. The villains willing use The Moonstone trope to fool those involved. Racism is an essential factor here. No one would be fooled if they didn’t believe all foreigners were inherently suspicious. Christie used many Gothic elements in her work, especially at the beginning.

The Detection Club

Christie was part of a group of Mystery writers, known as The Detection Club, who tried to improve the quality of the genre. (This group included Dorothy L. Sayers, E. C. Bentley, G. K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr) Known as “fair play rules”, they were later called “Knox’s Commandments” (1929) after Ronald Knox, another member. You can find these rules easily on the Internet, but often they leave out one rule: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” Christie’s tale appeared six years before this rule, and she turned it on its head. All too often, The Detection Club found, stories had no solution beyond the villain was Chinese or some other alien citizen. So that rule really meant no sloppy writing of the solution.

Sax Rohmer

I should mention other writers like Sax Rohmer totally disregarded this idea. He built his fortune at the feet of The Moonstone. His most famous character, Dr. Fu Manchu, is the epitome of the evil foreigner. Fu was descended from Doyle’s Moriarty, a sinister mastermind who lurked behind assassination and crime. Elements of Rohmer would find their way into the James bond novels of Ian Fleming. Rohmer wrote many other books, usually flavored with the Orient. He wrote actual Horror fiction on occasion with Egyptian sorcery in Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918).

In Horror fiction, the weird foreigner had no such proscription. Throughout the Pulps the villain is often of Asian descent. (I looked at this in Science Fiction here.) The Horror Pulps like Weird Tales had its own brand of racism. But it is easy to get too focused on the racist side of things and to lose the Gothic.

H. P. Lovecraft

Think about this: the past destroying the future is the core of almost any story about a ghost, a haunted house, a cursed item or gigantic interstellar beings owning the earth before humankind. Yes, even the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft is this trope in some form. Why do the Lovecraftian narrators all go insane or get eaten? Because a terrible thing from the past destroys them. While Christie and The Detection Club members were removing The Moonstone trope from their fiction, Horror could in no way do this. It is the core of the entire genre.

Try to think of a Horror tale that doesn’t use it. “The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927) by H. P. Lovecraft has an alien life form arrive on the planet in a meteorite. (Yes, The Blob stole that.) This story, which is heavy on Horror atmosphere, is often called a Science Fiction story. And that is why. By having the Horror be derived in the present (and in other cases out of the future), we tend to think of them as SF first. By this token then, “Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938), an SF tale by John W. Campbell, is actually a Horror story first, because the alien arrived long ago and is awakened. The men use Science to defeat it so it is considered an SF tale, but I would argue it is actually a Horror tale first.

(That was why the John Carpenter version is superior to the giant carrot of 1951. Carpenter is in full Gothic mode.) Science Fiction, if you are of the Brian W. Aldiss school, was created by Mary Shelley, when she took the Gothic explique, a type of explained Horror novel, and put the explanation at the beginning. In this way SF is part of the Mystery/Horror Gothic circle.

Conclusion

The purpose of Horror is to give you an enjoyable chill. The purpose of a Mystery is to set an intriguing puzzle before you. The intent of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which critics call a Sensation Novel, a form of thriller, was both. And he succeeded. For even though his own name may not be as famous as Charles Dickens, The Moonstone trope has become part of the Gothic fabric of literature.