In the meantime, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper.

This statement, uttered by Gabriel Betteredge, the loyal steward in Wilkie Collins’s 1868 detective novel, The Moonstone, confesses to what most writers experience quite regularly: disappointment with their own literary creation especially when starting out.

Betteredge’s declaration of literary hesitation, his avowed lack of self-confidence or “false start,” lets us know that the subject of this novel, which professes to be a mystery or a detective novel, is also a novel about writing and recording a story. A few sentences later, Betteredge tells us — albeit rather theatrically — this:

The question of how I am to start the story properly I have tried to settle in two ways. First, by scratching my head, which led to nothing. Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope, which has resulted in an entirely new idea.

Betteredge wants to get the story right but he has a problem: his own self is getting in the way.

My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far. She remarks that is it beautifully written, and every word of it is true. But she points out one objection. She says what I have done so far isn’t in the least what I wanted to do. I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond, and instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self.

And so Collins raises a literary dilemma: how does a writer tell a story that is both true and also engaging; and how does a writer avoid the trap of erasing the subject by writing over that subject with himself? How can Betteredge best tell the story of an alluring object, a diamond stolen from the Verinder household where he is employed as guardian, head steward, and where, in narrative terms, he finds himself as chief witness and lead narrator tasked with recording what might have happened?

We are provided with some early clues here as to Betteredge’s character. He is fond of a theatrical gesture: ‘First, by scratching my head;’ and he is easily distracted and led to consult the opinions of others. He is suggestible. ‘Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope,’ which provides him with “an entirely new idea”. And so he will start again; he will begin with a new approach, a method which prepares us for the multifarious versions of events we face in this novel; the several accounts; the mass of papers collected from individual characters collated into one manuscript bundle which Wilkie Collins has the audacity to call a novel.

But what kind of novel this is is open to question. A detective novel, a mystery, a romance, a sensation novel, a piece of theatre, a set of memoirs, an historical account, a traveller’s tale, a set of related testimonies producing, in turn, a set of character studies or shorter stories. All would be true, and as reader, especially one desiring generic clarity, it is hard to know where to start with our response.

(A blog piece for my students taking the British Detective Fiction class at Keble College, Oxford, this summer where we are discussing how to read closely and carefully and how to write clearly and directly as we practise framing our points and using the language of the text subtly and succinctly to make our arguments).