So, Charles Dickens’ great fragment, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” has been finished by a contemporary writer?
That’s what I thought, eyeing the titles of Dan Simmons’ and Matthew Pearl’s new novels.
At last.
The story of Dickens’ final book is legendary. Twelve installments were planned, but Dickens finished only half. On the day before his death on June 9, 1870, Dickens wrote the final sentence of the sixth, dined with his family and suffered a stroke. He fell to the floor and never regained consciousness.
Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were in agony. The six installments present us with tormented John Jasper, choirmaster and opium addict, who desires his nephew Edwin’s fiance, Rosa Budd.
Another rival for Rosa arrives, but Dickens stirs suspicions about Jasper, whose murderous looks at Edwin are unmistakable. Other characters are introduced as Jasper’s foils, and then Edwin disappears. That’s it. Dickens left behind no notes, no outlines, nothing.
There have been attempts to finish Dickens’ murder book before, but not recent ones. The timing seems right for someone to take Dickens on again. And yet, neither Simmons nor Pearl picks up where Dickens left off; instead, each uses the circumstances surrounding Dickens’ final novel to create detective stories of his own.
Simmons’ “Drood” is big, bulky, outrageous, irritating, phantasmic. The entire tale — all 772 pages of it — is told by Wilkie Collins, a sometime collaborator and friend of Dickens’ who produced the sensational detective novel “The Moonstone.”
This novel is crammed with every conceivable aspect of Victoriana, both real and imagined: At times, I grew irritable and impatient for Simmons to get on with it.
And yet. The payoff to persevering is reading richly imagined scenes in which Simmons describes Dickens’ performance of the murder of “Oliver Twist’s” Nancy by Bill Sikes before a terrified audience or Collins’ journey with Dickens to Undertown, Drood’s kingdom in London’s sewers.
In Pearl’s “The Last Dickens,” James Osgood desperately needs to find out how Dickens planned to end the story so that his company, which publishes Dickens in America, can do something similar — publish the fragment along with the Chief’s notes — and be saved from financial peril.
With his assistant, Rebecca, Osgood travels to England and to Gad’s Hill to search among Dickens’ papers. Like Simmons, Pearl includes a menacing figure — a sinister, cape-wearing Parsee named Herman — whose interest in the unfinished novel stays, like him, in the shadows. Pearl also includes story lines about Dickens’ final American reading tour and near-kidnapping by an obsessed fan and the experiences of his son, Frank, in the Bengal mounted police.
The author of “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow,” Pearl creates a story of 19th-century publishing with a crime at its center — a youth is murdered for knowing too much about the opium trade — and, in bringing Dickens into this, suggests the novelist would have exposed that crime in his novel if he hadn’t died.
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