An East London scholar reads about six non-league footballers suspended over a fight and turns to Wilkie Collins, whose Indian diamond novel invented the modern investigation
Friday, 23 October 2026. Bow, East London. A pub off Mile End Road with a television showing non-league highlights to nobody, a pint of bitter, a battered Oxford World’s Classics Moonstone, 6.30pm.
Seven Minutes Late And Six Men Suspended
The London Prat reports that six Bramblewick Rovers players were suspended after a teammate arrived seven minutes late. The lad’s Fiesta broke down outside a Greggs, he heroically walked past a sausage roll, and he arrived to find that the captain had replaced lateness fines with a policy of fighting a teammate. Six players piled in. Two were arrested. Supporters said it was the most coordinated movement the club had managed all season.
The pub television is showing non-league highlights as I write, and I am fairly certain one of the teams is wearing the same shade of mud as Bramblewick. Nobody is watching. The landlord is reading his phone. I am reading Wilkie Collins, because I teach The Moonstone next week, and because the report is, at heart, a story about an inquiry into what exactly happened in a room full of men who all claim to have been somewhere else.
A Diamond From Seringapatam
The Moonstone, published in 1868, is often called the first full-length detective novel in English. It opens with the British storming of Seringapatam in 1799, where a soldier named John Herncastle steals a sacred yellow diamond from a Hindu shrine, murdering its guardians. The diamond is cursed. Decades later it is bequeathed to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her eighteenth birthday in a Yorkshire country house, and stolen the same night. Three Brahmin priests have followed it from India to recover it. Everybody suspects everybody.
What makes the novel brilliant is its structure. Collins tells the story through a series of witnesses, each writing their own account: the elderly house steward, a pious spinster, a lawyer, a doctor’s assistant. Each one is sure of what happened. Each one is partly wrong. The truth emerges only when the accounts are laid side by side.
Bramblewick Needed A Sergeant Cuff
The detective in The Moonstone is Sergeant Cuff, a thin, melancholy policeman who would rather be growing roses. He listens to everybody, believes nobody and eventually gets nearly everything right. I would give a great deal to see Sergeant Cuff interview the Bramblewick squad. Six players, each with an account. The captain, who devised the fighting policy and now wishes he had not. The late player, whose only crime was a broken Fiesta and admirable restraint near a Greggs. The supporters, whose witness statement amounts to: it was the best they have played all year.
Cuff would have solved it in an afternoon and then gone off to prune his roses. The real lesson would have been his, not the club’s: violence that is written down as a rule is still violence, and the person who wrote the rule is the first suspect.
Collins, incidentally, wrote much of The Moonstone while ill and in pain, dictating chapters to a secretary when he could not hold a pen. He finished it anyway, on schedule, for serial publication. Nobody suspended him for lateness.
The Uncomfortable Part Of The Moonstone
The Moonstone is also a novel about empire, and Collins, unusually for his time, is clear about where the guilt lies. The original theft is a British crime committed in India. The three priests who follow the diamond are not villains but guardians. At the end, the stone returns to its shrine. I tell my students that this ending was quietly radical in 1868, two decades after the Indian uprising of 1857, when most British fiction painted Indians as threats. Collins painted them as the wronged party, and nobody seemed to notice. That is often how serious points get through: inside an entertaining story.
A Russian Digression Over A Second Pint
My other subject, Russian politics, has its own long tradition of internal inquiries that conclude, after careful deliberation, that the person who ordered the inquiry did nothing wrong. Purges, show trials, commissions, all with the same narrative shape. The Daily Mash had a go at the British version of this paranoia recently with we were Russian agents all along, admit your Brexiter parents. I sent it to my mother in Romford. She replied that she was not a Russian agent, she simply did not like the French. I said that was exactly what a Russian agent would say. She has not replied since.
Last Orders For Sergeant Cuff
The highlights have finished. The landlord has switched to snooker. A man at the bar has asked whether my book is any good, and I said it is the best detective novel ever written, and he said he prefers Vera. We had a ten-minute argument about Northumberland. Collins would have enjoyed it. He wrote for the general reader, serialized his books in magazines and wanted people in pubs to argue about who stole the diamond.
For anyone who has found their way here through the comedy nights I track, my list includes the Capital City Comedy date, which I am still recovering from. A comic there did a routine about a five-a-side team that settled disputes by penalty shoot-out, and it was funnier than anything in the Premier League. Bramblewick Rovers should consider it. Sergeant Cuff would approve. So would the roses.