The 110-Year-Old Murder

By Stefan Kanfer

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

by Charles Dickens; concluded by Leon Garfield; Andre Deutsch; 327 pages; -L-7.95

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

"I must go to London immediately." Thus speaks Charles Dickens, 58, on the evening of June 8, 1870. They are his last words. He collapses on a sofa in his dining room and dies the following night. Upon hearing the news, a melancholy world grieves for itself: there will be no more rumbustious squires, no more hilarious cockneys, no more sneaking, slavering villains or appealing waifs, no more enchantments at all from the man who correctly dubbed his own work "inimitable." His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, its sentences as convoluted as London streets, its title ominously resonant of "dread" and "mood," lies half done: 23 chapters and some scattered notes. Like such unfinished masterpieces as Schubert's Eighth Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Drood powerfully intrigues readers and writers. Publishers offer Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone, the privilege of completing Edwin Drood; he declines, but later writes a similar story of duality and the changing tales of good and evil; he calls it Miss or Mrs.? Other attempts are made by lesser authors--and next to the Master what author is not diminished? In the '20s, a silent movie is produced, and in 1935, Claude Rains stars in a film that seems to have been made in gothic twilight.

A CURIOUS BREAKTHROUGH

None of the attempts to solve the Drood mystery is an aesthetic or financial success. George Bernard Shaw offers a reason: the novel was "a gesture by a man already three-quarters dead." Novelist J.B. Priestley counters, "Three-quarters dead though he might be, he was feeling his way towards yet another sort of fiction." That fiction is the modern mystery story, with its careful plotting, its characters subordinate to story, and its yielding of surprises as the drama moves toward denouement. To that end, Dickens wrote the only one of his work that can be summarized (although in his case that is like reversing an oak into a nutshell): John Jasper, choirmaster, lusts after Rosa Bud, betrothed to his nephew Edwin Drood. When Drood disappears, a young rival for Rosa Bud, Neville Landless, is accused of murder. Because no body is found, Landless is released. Enter the ostentatiously mysterious Datchery, an old man with juvenile energy. Is he disguised? Is he a detective? Is he a woman? Is he Drood himself? Through the drama swirl the premonitory themes of drug addiction and Eastern religion, played out by a varied cast of supporting characters (and suspects): the cheerful clergyman Crisparkle; Mr. Grewgious, one of the very few likable lawyers in the Dickens canon; the admirable young naval officer, Lieutenant Tartar; the sulky clerk Bazzard; and the bullying philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder. All are the products of a unique and fevered imagination; none can possibly be reproduced. Or can they?

A RESURRECTION OF STYLE

In the year 1980, with a coincidence so uncanny that Charles Dickens might have written it, not one but two Edwin Drood continuations appear. The Decoding of Edwin Drood (Scribners; $10.95) is written by Charles Forsyte, the nom de plume for a husband-and-wife team of British mystery writers. The Forsyte book picks up where Dickens departed but omits the preceding chapters. The reader is left with only the latter half of the novel, composed without the tone or richness of its predecessor. The reader might well sigh with Kate Perugini, Dickens' daughter: "In my father's grave lies buried the secret of his story." And yet ... and yet ... the Londoner Leon Garfield, 59, hitherto a writer of juveniles, composes his own conclusion to Edwin Drood, including Antony Maitland's new illustrations, happily capturing the Master's locutions: "Curious, bland, yet deeply various gentleman ... he was very like a convert to a new faith, who walks in the ways of the Lord with such assiduity as to obliterate His footsteps entirely."

A DIVIDED MIND AND MAN

The Garfield version, to be published in the U.S. by Pantheon Books in 1981, is sympathetic to the circumstances that fathered Drood: Dickens was consumed by his liaison with the 20-year-old actress Ellen Lawless Ternan. "The affair overshadows the book," Garfield be lieves. "Jasper represents Dickens himself. At times the affair with a girl so much younger must have appalled Dickens, who had conventional moral views."

It would be unsporting to give the game away; suffice it to note that the continuer does not hold with G.K. Chesterton's theory that "if Drood is dead, then there is not much mystery about him." As to Jasper, he is indeed made a version of his guilt-racked creator, a man, notes Garfield, "who was beginning to have a far greater interest in the criminal, and the divided mind." Doubtless this divided book will not have done with the Droodists -- or with subsequent versions. It is merely the best to date: arbitrary, full of guesswork and lively writing, and ample evidence that whether Edwin Drood is dead or not, Charles Dickens is alive.

--By Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

" He brought the lantern lower, until its light fell ... It was a pit of quicklime; and, as the lantern descended closer, it could be seen that the gases had swollen within it and forced up a counterfeit image of what it had consumed.

There, upon the ground, lay the whitened image of a youth. His white eyes were starting from their crumbly sockets; his white mouth was gaping and within it, his teeth (still unconsumed), gleamed like beads. But worst of all, round his white neck was the knot of the white scarf (once black) with which he had been strangled! The burning quicklime, like the burning mind above it, had thrust up the knowledge of the crime!...

Everything had happened! EVERYTHING!"

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