Kant’s “Jewel” and Collins’s “Moonstone”

Abstract

Mystery fiction is sometimes assumed—both by scholars and by general readers—to have a simple or even simplistic relationship to morality. Mysteries, on this view, are straightforward "whodunnits": They satisfy readers by identifying wrongdoing and then assigning blame to the individual or individuals responsible. In this paper, I offer a contrary view. I show that the moral laboratory of mystery fiction often winds up subverting, undermining, and unsettling some of our most basic moral assumptions and our standard approaches to thinking about moral responsibility and moral justification. It does so, I argue, by emphasizing what philosophers term moral luck. I center my analysis on moral luck as it appears in The Moonstone, the novel T. S. Eliot called “the first, the longest, and the best” piece of detective fiction, and I offer suggestions for reading later works of mystery fiction with moral luck in mind.