MATTHEW PEARL – The Last Dickens. Random House, hardcover, March 2009; trade paperback, October 2009.

   Matthew Pearl has continued his excursions into nineteenth-century historical fiction begun with The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow with The Last Dickens — a meticulously researched account of events, both real and imagined, that follow upon the sudden death of author Charles Dickens, with only six episodes of his detective novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, completed.

   J. T. Fields, senior partner in the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co., Dickens’ American publishers, on the slender hope that a completed manuscript might exist, dispatches his energetic junior partner, James R. Osgood, accompanied by Rebecca Sands, the company’s bookkeeper, to England, where they pursue their quest with increasing urgency, and danger to themselves.

   The novel spans several years (from 1867, the year of Dickens’ last American visit, to 1870, the year of the writer’s death), and three continents. The novel begins in India, with its harvesting of opium under British supervision for an international market, providing what appears to be a diversion from the main trajectory of the novel.

   Then, as the suspense mounts in the pursuit of the elusive and possibly non-existent manuscript, leading Osgood into the opium dens of London, the implications of the events in far-off India become all too clear.

   Anyone who thinks that modern drug trafficking, with its attendant horrors, is a recent phenomenon, will be astonished at its prevalence in the 19th century. Sherlock Holmes’ “eccentric” drug usage had significant contemporary relevance, and the poppy fields of India are the backdrop against which the events of the novel play out

   There are elements that seem fanciful, such as the stalking of Dickens by a deranged Boston female fan (for which, in fact, there is some historical evidence), but the novel easily sheds the manufactured air that can beset historical novels.

   The often bloody wars between rival publishing houses, in a era when America offered no copyright protection for foreign writers, are vividly presented, with the rivalry between Fields and Harper generating much of the dramatic heat of the novel. But if the plot is intricately (and cleverly) laid out, the characters are never subservient to it.

   Finally, I read Pearl’s notes on his sources for the novel with as much interest as I did the novel itself. They answered many of the questions I might have raised about the authenticity of the narrative, with an imaginary dialogue between Pearl and James Osgood a particular delight.

   For me, the dialogue highlighted Matthew Pearl’s ability to create a sense of immediacy that bridges the temporal gap between the 19th and 21st centuries. This may be historical fiction, but it’s history that’s brought to vivid life by the author.