‘Wilkie Collins’s Novel The Moonstone‘
The Moonstone is a 1868 novel credited with helping to invent the modern rules of the detective novel. You don’t have to look far to see detective work in Nolan movies — Memento, The Dark Knight films, Tenet and Inception are all, one way or another, detective stories.
But the Christopher Nolan film that pays the most overt homage to The Moonstone is Dunkirk. As Shone notes, The Moonstone is the name of the small craft owned by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), one of many civilians who volunteers to help pull off the Dunkirk evacuation. “They’ve asked for the Moonstone,” he declares, “they’ll have her.”