The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel and Our Endless Attempts to End It by Pete Orford (review)

Pete Orford has written an engaging, near-comprehensive study that treats a myriad of solutions to and completions of Dickens's unfinished novel. These versions span different genres, from novels, to film, to television, to comics, to adult fanfiction. Because of the book's foray into popular culture, the writing style might seem irreverent for those readers expecting the usual academic prose. For example, Orford quips in the introduction, "Like Frankenstein, or any other scientist of the Hammer Horror genre, he who decides to investigate Drood is looked upon with an element of pity" (x). The scholar hopes to find himself or herself "standing in the laboratory of a lightning-struck castle screaming 'He's alive!'" (xi). Orford does admit that his approach "varies between celebration and bemusement" (xi) and points out early on that the book will not disclose his own beliefs on how the novel ends. Rather, in four chapters, Orford offers many theories surrounding Drood, all adding to the body of knowledge concerning the novel, Dickens, and his readership over time.

To help organize the wealth of Drood activity, Orford uses terminology such as "solutions and completions;" a solution is an expression of ideas "about how Drood might end," and a completion is a "fully fictionalized second half" (xiii). He then divides the different Droodists into camps: the Opportunists, the Detectives, the Academics, and the Irreverent. The camps are humorously treated as sports teams as Orford writes that one camp seeks "vengeance" on another, or one will attempt to "challenge" another.

Chapter one is devoted to the Opportunists and early solutions, 1870–1885. Opportunists want to make money on the sales of their solutions/completions. Several solutions and completions are summarized, such as the "first solution" (11) by American writer Robert Henry Newell, writing as Orpheus C. Kerr. His novel, The Cloven Foot is set in America, and Orford argues that the work was not only meant to parody Dickens, but America as well. For example, Cloisterham is Bumsteadville, and John Jasper is John Bumstead, "a drunken buffoon with a perpetual stink about him of cloves" (12-13). The Cloven Foot was republished in England as The Mystery of Edwin Drood "with the character and place names changed back to their Dickensian originals" and thus "the first completion had been submitted to the world" (17). Other Opportunists included are the "audacious" The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1873) by Thomas Power James, who claimed that his work was dictated to him by Dickens's ghost, and Gillian Vase's 1878 novel, A Great Mystery Solved. Orford calls Vase's work a "behemoth solution" (25) because the addition of new characters and their backstories made the work a three-volume novel of almost a thousand pages.

Orford's next chapter is devoted to another category of Droodists, the Detectives, 1878–1939, those who sought to solve the mystery in the way they believe Dickens had intended. He presents what seems an exhaustive number of works that offered solutions to the novel, but Orford cautions that "there are many more articles and discussions that have not been covered" (72). Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will enjoy this chapter in particular, because Orford touches on several works that feature Sherlock Holmes investigating the Drood mystery. A 1905 piece by Andrew Lang, for example, has Holmes and Watson talking about Dickens's book and contemplating different solutions – "a slow day on Baker Street" (40), Orford remarks. The chapter also covers solutions on film, a silent film of the early 20^th century and a 1935 film made in the "Gothic horror" genre.

Next, the Academics stress, not so much the mystery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but Dickens himself as a master of the dark, psychological portrait. Here, Orford focuses on Edmund Wilson's "seminal essay 'Dickens: The Two...