The ur-text of all detected novels to come…

Folks

• Franklin Blake, our hero, cousin to and lover of Rachel Verinder; has traveled to foreign parts and was “tainted” by French sentimentality and German philosophy and has many faults, but wins because he is loyal and open to any option to solve the mystery
• Lady Verinder, rich, with beautiful daughter; her refusal to speak to the “wicked Colonel,” her kinsman who stole the Diamond during an uprising in India, leads to her daughter’s receiving the diamond—and its curse
• Rachel Verinder, beautiful and intelligent, ferociously loyal to Blake, sabotages the early investigation to save him
• Godfrey Ablewhite, the charming, pious philanthropist, supposedly in love with Rachel, who is really just a hypocritical ladykiller who needs to settle debts incurred to keep a mistress
• Matthew Bruff, family lawyer who advises Rachel on many occasions; clear sighted and a good man, but not imaginative or sentimental
• Miss Clack, a poor relation who is sweet on Godfrey and annoys everyone with her charity and obnoxious piety and pamphlets
• Gabriel Betteredge, the old servant of the house: curious, steadfast, loves Robinson Crusoe, trusted by all, confidant of all
• Roseanna Spearman, a reformed thief of the first degree, the second housemaid, falls in love at first sight with Franklin Blake and works to save him; commits suicide when he neglects her
• Sergeant Cuff, brilliant detective who makes no false move but can’t solve the mystery because Rachel won’t tell him anything
• Ezra Jennings, an outcast, piebald Jewish doctor, assistant to the local doctor who gives Blake a dose of opium to get him back for his deprecatory remarks about the medical profession; he helps unravel the mystery with Blake and suggests the experiment, recreating all the conditions of the night of the theft
• The Three Hindus, sent to protect the diamond, eventually kill Godfrey to take the diamond back to India

Themes

• Collins’ own heroic duty towards readers by authoring throughout personal disaster (see preface)
• The Ingredients of a Mystery
  • And old crusty Villain
  • Young Romance
  • A missing Jewel
  • Mysterious foreigners
  • Clairvoyance
• New Science
  • Experimental method (recreating the entire situation perfectly)
  • Trusting the fringes of society, the outcast Ezra Jennings
  • No one believing you (Betteredge, Bruff, and Cuff are scoffing)
    • Betteredge believes the Word of Defoe (the Bible, aka Robinson Crusoe, rather than the medical procedure)
  • Medical science needs to be like the other sciences: precise and systematic (cf. Middlemarch)
• Practical versus moral guilt (Blake technically stole it, but not responsible)
• Foreign troubles eventually coming back to England
• Robinson Crusoe
  • Shows readership habits of lower classes
  • Entails a critique of religion because he uses it the way others use the Bible (cf ridicule of Miss Clack, who organizes chaperones for servants’ days off and sews alcoholic men’s pants into shorts for their little boys; and deadly hypocrisy of Godfrey Ablewhite)
  • Shows people how they can use books
• Xenophobia: Franklin Blake’s foreignness is seen by Gabriel as trouble
• Character: who knows a person, the detective or the mother?
  • Intuitive knowledge versus proof
• Reverse determinism: the character is supposed to drive the events, rather than the events driving the character (cf the Preface)
• Romance: is this a mystery novel or a simple love story? Ultimately, the whole plot revolves around loyalty to the people you love