Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. A prolific playwright and novelist, William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) created his masterpiece, The Moonstone, at the age of 44. Even though it was not too enthusiastically received by such classics of his time as Dickens, the novel introduced a new genre of a detective story and is remarkable for its excellent plot-development as well as its finely moulded characters. It did and still does leave the reader breathless and puzzled to the very end. Some of the themes exploited in the novel - for example, the British in India - added to the success of the book. An important and not so frequent element of the story is the use of opium. This theme is particularly well developed since Collins (suffering from gout all his life) experienced the action of the substance (in the form of laudanum) on himself and went through a series of delusional episodes, firmly believing he was followed by his imaginary alter ego, Ghost Wilkie .