As a child, I knew diamonds were the mark of a story worth burning out torch batteries for under the covers. Would D’Artagnan reclaim the Queen’s diamond earrings? Could Sherlock Holmes solve the mystery of The Blue Carbuncle? In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, would the little Belgian detective discover how a man was murdered in a locked room and a large quantity of uncut diamonds stolen from his safe? I read frantically to find out.
Radiant, indestructible, immortal—diamonds are what we are not, and our admiration of them comes to no good. At least, that’s what books invariably tell us. But with all the misfortune they leave in their wake, these MacGuffins make for unrivaled plot devices, and have been inspiring swashbuckling adventures and exquisite mysteries since the year dot.
In my debut novel Before the Ruins, a diamond necklace—missing since the 1930s—becomes the focus of a game of a hide and seek a group of friends play on the grounds of an abandoned manor house. For Andy, my troubled protagonist, rather than the promise of riches, it’s the beauty and magic of the game that keeps her playing. It’s no plot spoiler to tell you secrets, lies, tragedy and betrayal follow on. Twenty years later when her best friend Peter goes missing, her search for him is not only a search for the truth about what happened all those years ago, it’s also for the beauty and magic that have eluded her in adult life.
Below, I’ve mined the annals of literature for five sparkling diamond-studded favorites for you to enjoy…
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
“The human heart is unsearchable. Who is to fathom it?”
I envy anyone who hasn’t read The Moonstone. Published in 1868 and credited as a precursor of the whole detective genre, the novel has it all. The titular Moonstone is a huge yellow diamond whose luminescence waxes and wanes with the moon. Its rightful home is on the forehead of a statue of the Hindu Moon god Chandra, but it’s stolen from India by wicked Jack Herncastle, whose last act of mischief is to bequeath it to his niece Rachel on her eighteenth birthday. Pursued by three hereditary Brahmin guardians, the Moonstone carries a curse which comes into effect when it’s stolen from a country house, an event described in epistolatory form by a series of narrators who piggyback the narrative forward as we seek to solve the mystery of its disappearance.
Betrayal, opium dreams, thwarted love, a desolate patch of shivering quicksand, double lives, clairvoyancy, a headstrong heroine, and—in the figure of Sergeant Cruff—one of the earliest detective heroes, The Moonstone has enough plot for three novels as well as managing to convey a deep unease with Britain’s colonial exploits. Reading it now, you’ll be struck by the leisurely pace of narration; succumbing to it is like sinking into a warm bath on a cold winter’s night. The spell of the Moonstone is a strong as ever; after a good soak in its glow, you’ll find yourself calling for the port and wondering which of your cousins you should marry.
“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant
“How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!”
In this short story by Maupassant from 1884 a diamond necklace comes to symbolize the toxicity of wanting what you can’t have. The protagonist, Mademoiselle Loisel, is pretty and charming but has allowed herself to be married off to a “little clerk.” Tortured by her poor surroundings, unable to enjoy the honest love of her husband or the simple pleasures of their life together, she makes herself miserable longing for the luxury of “salons fitted up with ancient silk.” To please her, her husband wangles them an invite to an official ball. It’s not enough. She needs a dress. Then she needs some jewels. Fortunately, she has a rich friend, Mademoiselle Forestier who allows her to rifle through her jewelry collection: “All of a sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds; and her heart began to beat with immoderate desire.”
The ball is a triumph, but on the way home she loses the necklace. And you thought spilling a glass of wine over your laptop was bad! The Loisels must spend their life savings and indebt themselves up to the neck to buy a replacement. They move to a garret under a roof and spend the next decade in penury as they repay their creditors. Madame Loisel loses all her beauty and charm, becoming “strong and hard and rough.” Finally, ten years on and back to square one, she bumps into Madame Forestier and confesses that the diamonds she returned were not the ones she borrowed, paving the way for one of the most savage twists in literature. And while the moral of the story may be to value what you have, Maupassant also makes clear that for women, barred from advancement through “rank,” their desirability is often the only card they have to play.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green moon’s heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern stuffs paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan.”
This novella, published in 1922 when Scott was twenty-six and most likely written a few years earlier, is both staggeringly bizarre and a remarkable piece of juvenilia by anyone’s standards. John T. Unger hails from the prosperous town of Hades which has “the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed.” Packed off to St. Midas’s, the world’s most exclusive prep school, he meets Percy Washington, handsome and aloof, who claims his father possesses a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
Unger is invited to spend the summer with Washington’s family and the two head deep into the MontanaRockies to “the only five square miles of land in the country that’s never been surveyed.” There, Unger finds himself in a happy valley of impossible wealth and poisonous luxury, the descriptions of which show the influence of Decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and JK Huysman. Turns out, the mountain overshadowing the valley is one huge diamond and to avoid its discovery the Washingtons have taken to shooting down passing planes and imprisoning the captured airmen. “Many men in the cage, father?” asks Percy to Washington Snr. To hammer home the repulsive morals of the superrich, the family are served by slaves, who’ve been conned into believing the South won the Civil War.
Unger falls in love with Percy’s sister Kismine, who eventually confesses that the family murder their guests at the end of each summer, “once we’ve had all the pleasure out of them.” Before Unger can meet the same fate, an escaped Italian tutor brings down a firestorm of bombs upon the valley. The lovers escape, only to witness Braddock Washington trying and failing to bribe God with a massive diamond before blowing himself, his remaining family and the diamond mountain to kingdom come. Full of weird biblical overtones, indebted to the Lost World novels of the previous century and eschewing the realism of later works, with Unger’s closing speech to Kismine Washington reveals a glimpse of future masterpieces and the genius he is well on his way to becoming:
“At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.”
That’s your boy!
“Below Rubies” by Helen Simpson (published in the collection Four Bare Legs in a Bed)
“I’ll count to a hundred before I put my hand up to check for the necklace.”
I read this short story as a teenager and its narrator has haunted me for more than a quarter of a century. Writing this article, I knew I had to hunt it down even though I only had a vague recollection of it to go on. Turns out the diamonds in it are actually rubies and pearls, a listicle-anomaly I know you’ll forgive since the story itself is so damn good. Reading it now, I can see why it got under my skin. The heroine is fat and self-hating, lustful and sharp. She’s aware of what’s allotted her but means to have more. It must have been like looking in a mirror.
Condemned to spending eight hours a day in a stuffy jewellery shop, the narrator shuttles to and from work on the bus surrounded by “sour old Peckhamites.” Her disapproving sister, the only girl from their school ever to make it on to college, is a trainee solicitor. When the narrator visits her, she’s treated to tedious conversations about grouting and the best time to have children (twenty-seven and three-quarters). Self-improvement’s not for her. The only company she fancies is that of certain Black women on the bus with their friends who act “like they’ve had three brandies before breakfast, laughing and shouting” but with whom she doesn’t share a language.
She hates the early hours of dawn which remind her of death but loves music, color and being overwhelmed. Best of all is the fairground where she picks up a bad boy who looks like a cartoon villain with a tattoo round his neck. She takes him home and when they come to it, “it was as mad as the Waltzer.” Afterwards she looks in the mirror and feels “none of the usual shame.” Colin, the villain, sponges off her, but she loves it. She has few illusions about him but wants what she wants, nonetheless. Still, the affair sours. Colin gives her a fat lip and takes off with her rent money.
Soon after, her boss, Old Grouse, brings a necklace into the shop that’s a web of rubies and pendant pearls “as big as pear drops.” She models it and the necklace effects a transformation, lending her skin “a nap like expensive writing paper.” It does what the gems in these stories often promise to do: make up for everything she lacks. Wanting Colin to see her in it, she borrows the necklace for the night. As hoped, it drives him into a frenzy of desire and what ensues “lasted more than I ever felt anything, with a sleep like a deep snowdrift at the end.” But she pays for her pleasure. Colin does a runner with the necklace and we leave her in the grey dawn, bereft of warmth, colour and beauty. But despite the bleak final note, you may find—as I did—that you continue to root for her, fearing she won’t find a way forward, hoping she will.
Diamond Doris by Doris Payne with Zelda Lockhart
“I heard the city whispering, Come get your diamonds, Doris.”
On its way to becoming a major feature film, this memoir tells the story of another girl who the world tries to cheat. Born smack between two world wars, Doris grows up in Slab Fork, West Virginia, the daughter of an illiterate miner who beats her mother. The best Black girls like her can hope for is to become nurses, spending their days ‘wiping the asses of rich old white folks’. It’s a fate Doris rejects decisively, choosing instead to become an international jewel thief whose career will span six decades. Stealing diamonds is Doris’s revenge, revenge against the racists who want to subjugate and humiliate her, revenge against men who want to control her and make her financially dependent on them, revenge upon the industry that stirs conflict in Africa and rapes it for its wealth.
In order to be successful in her chosen trade, she learns how to adopt the voice, clothes and manners of the rich. If you look and sound like them, you can get away with it. Before each raid, she dresses with the care and attention of a woman preparing for a lover. The outfits are lavishly, fastidiously described. Perfectly capable of speaking like a debutante when she wants to, Doris talks to the reader like a sailor and it’s impossible not to applaud her relentless, breath-taking daring. From Cleveland to New York, from Paris to Monte Carlo to Athens, Doris is addicted to the con and the sparkle and the sheer sexiness of it all. While diamonds also become a compensation for the losses that accrue as she ages, this is no tale of a woman getting her comeuppance for stepping out of line, rather that of a total bad ass, who flatly refuses to take what’s on offer and damn the consequences.
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