With The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins is credited with writing the first detective novel—a genre that runs on secrets and the uncovering of them. Initially serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round and released to enormous success, The Moonstone has it all: stolen jewelry, purloined letters, dirty linen, death by quicksand. Women have fainting fits as the virtues of opium are lauded. Suspicious details and red herrings abound. The stuff of domestic trifles is blown up and meticulously inspected—often literally under the lens of a magnifying glass. Dorothy L. Sayers called