The Moonstone does not feature disparate narrators each giving their version of the same set of events.

The Moonstone's mysterious disappearance starts the whole story, and the characters in the novel are all connected by their relation to the diamond and its disappearance. The central conflict of The Moonstone involves the disappearance of a Diamond, and the subsequent attempts to solve this mystery.

The truth of the situation is very important. It gives the story depth, history, relevance, and an exotic and sinister aspect. Several times, the story’s plot takes twists and turns, with an apparent truth turning out to be false. The story of the Prologue echoes …

The narrator recounts one such story about a famous yellow diamond called The Moonstone, originally from a statue of the Indian moon god, which shone with the cycles of the moon.

On the night before the assault on Seringapatam, he was absurdly angry with me, and with others, for treating the whole thing as a fable. Truth, Honesty, and Reality. Instead, each narrator picks up where the last left off— The Moonstone offers a variety of narrative voices, not of plot. Betteredge and Rosanna Spearman both make some very politically charged comments about social class and the position of servants. Collins employed many devices we now recognize as standard in detective fiction: a celebrated investigator called in especially to solve a crime, multiple “red herrings” in both suspects and clues, and a careful reconstruction of the crime.

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is considered to be the first “modern” detective novel.

As a matter of fact, the Prologue really sets up the rest of the story; without this background, the motives of the Indian priests are not present.

But in The Moonstone, they are not only important to the story, they actually speak up and talk about their social position. The Moonstone is set in the mid-19th century, which was a time of immense social, economic, and political transformation in England as well as a crucial period in the history of British colonialism in India. So, as told in our camp, ran the fanciful story of the Moonstone.

It made no serious impression on any of us except my cousin--whose love of the marvellous induced him to believe it. In the 11th century, Muslim invaders pillaged a famous temple in Somnauth and took everything but this statue, which three Brahmins preserved in a new shrine in Benares. There isn't really a main character, like there is in Jane Eyre – the novel is constructed as a series of first-hand, eyewitness accounts by characters describing what they know about the disappearance or theft of the diamond.

(There was a similar myth in Rome and Greece.)