A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Mark Johnson

   

CHARLES DICKENS – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Published posthumously in 1870. Only six of the twelve projected parts had been completed by the time of Dickens’s death. First published in the US as The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Some Uncollected Pieces (Fields, Osgood, 1870).

   Charles Dickens turned to the pure mystery near the end of his life, and left us, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, one of the most compelling of all literary puzzles.

   Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud, both orphans, were betrothed as children by their parents. Now, as they approach their majority, this arrangement has poisoned the love between them. Edwin is fond of his uncle, John Jasper, the music director of the town cathedral, and his uncle appears fond of Edwin. But Jasper has fallen in love with Rosa, who despises him, and he is consumed by jealousy of his nephew.

   Another youth, Neville Landless, admires Rosa and, goaded by Jasper, Drood and Landless quarrel. Subsequently, Edwin and Rosa agree that their marriage would not work and call off the engagement. But before they can announce their decision, Edwin disappears-apparently the victim of murder.

   Evidence points to Landless, but there is no case against him because no body has been found. Landless flees in disgrace to London. Rosa, afraid of Jasper, also goes to London. A new character on the scene, known as Mr. Datchery but apparently someone else in disguise, begins dogging Jasper’s footsteps.

   At this point, halfway through the projected novel, Dickens died. He left evidence that Jasper was Drood’s killer-but also hinted that there had been no murder. An early working title for the novel was Edwin Drood in Hiding, and some have speculated that Jasper failed in his murder attempt and that Datchery is really the vengeful Drood. There have been many other theories about the novel’s conclusion. One, championed by the late Edmund Wilson (who hated mysteries but loved Dickens), is that Jasper was a devotee of the Indian Cult of Thugs, and that he murdered Drood as a required ritual act. Dickens’s remaining notes are ambiguous, however, and he had promised that the ending would be a great surprise, even to his friends.

   Dickens was a significant figure in the development of the mystery novel long before Edwin Drood. In 1828, when Dickens was seventeen, Robert Peel launched the modern London police force. The young writer was fascinated by the new profession, and in 1850 his magazine, Household Words, published four articles on police work, spawning considerable public interest in crime fighting. In Bleak House (1853), Dickens introduced the intrepid Inspector Bucket, a sort of nineteenth-century Columbo, who was the first fictional English police detective. Dickens was deeply influenced by his friend Wilkie Collins, whose classic novel The Moonstone was published in Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round in 1868.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.