Introduction

Indian Diamonds 107
tells of a diamond miner in southern Africa who travels to Borneo to obtain the
“largest and finest diamond in the world” (2: 155) from a local rajah. The diamond
is cursed and every single rajah who had guarded it had died a violent death (1:
138). It does lend itself to a comparison with the other texts, though, as the action
is mostly set in Borneo and not in Europe. The story, nevertheless, is interesting
because, like The Datchet Diamonds 1, it juxtaposes southern African and Oriental
wealth. Furthermore, Stevenson chose the same title for his short-story three years
later.
R. L. Stevenson’s “The Rajah’s Diamond” was published in The London Magazine
in 1878 before it appeared in the collection of the New Arabian Nights (1882).
The collection was published in two volumes with “The Suicide Club” and “The
Rajah’s Diamond” making up the first. Both stories feature the pair of Prince
Florizel of Bohemia and his faithful servant Colonel Geraldine. “The Rajah’s
Diamond” tells of the eponymous diamond’s passage from one owner to the next
in a succession of intentional and unintentional thefts and recoveries. “The Suicide
Club” and “The Rajah’s Diamond” are embedded in a frame narrative of an
editor recounting these stories from an Oriental manuscript and mediating the
“Oriental’s” voice (Stevenson, “Suicide” 68). This frame narrative imitates the
Arabian Nights of the title in connecting the different stories.
Arthur Conan Doyle admired Stevenson’s “The Pavilion on the Links” in the
second volume of the New Arabian Nights (Gray 90). Doyle produced his own
diamond narrative in The Sign of Four, published in 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine. It marks the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes and his friend,
biographer and sometime co-lodger Dr. John Watson, following their first adventure
in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Both novels split their action between London
and a colony so that Holmes investigates colonial crimes which follow their perpetrators
back to England, a device which recurs several times in the Holmes canon.
Doyle references The Moonstone in the plot of his novel and also in the name of
“Able White” (Doyle, Sign 214), an Anglo-Indian planter. Three other Sherlock
Holmes stories involve the theft of diamonds, “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”
(1892), “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (1892) and “The Adventure
of the Mazarin Stone” (1921). “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” identifies
the diamonds as presumably colonial. The beryl coronet is “[o]ne of the most
precious public possessions of the empire” (Doyle, “Beryl” 470) and thus evokes
objects like the crown jewels and a range of historical diamonds. The plotalso
shows some resemblance to The Moonstone, but Doyle does not so much focus the
description on the Indianness of the diamond but on the scene of the theft of the
Moonstone in Rachel’s room, although with reversed roles. In Doyle’s version,
Arthur watches his cousin Mary steal the coronet to run away with her lover. He
snatches part of it back, but he is caught by his father when he puts it into the
1 See p. 108.