Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Marianne North, John Kelt Edwards and William Powell Frith. A five-hundred-pound note vanishes from a lady's writing table, the companion is blamed, and a private inquiry agent called Old Sharon — filthy, cynical, and accompanied by a dog — solves it for a fee. Collins invented the detective novel with The Moonstone; this short 1877 book gives the work to a professional who is frankly in it for the money, forty years before anyone else made that respectable. Sixty plates of moonlit docks, burning boats and women in church by painters such as John Atkinson Grimshaw and James Tissot carry the book's atmosphere of suspicion and quiet watching.