![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A few score pages of preliminaries later, and Dickens is absorbed in ferreting out Droodian mysteries, rattled to discover that his necromantic quarry, “healer, master of Magnetic science, Christ figure, and secret mystic” late of Egypt, has in theory been dead for many years and that assorted cannibals, ghosts and spirit rappers figure into the grisly equation. Drood does not cut a pretty figure, “pale eyes in their sunken sockets,” muttering unintelligibly amid the gore, but he is certainly memorable. Collins, known today mostly for his mystery novel The Moonstone, if known at all, plays a kind of Salieri to Dickens’s Mozart, his jealousy evident: “Charles Dickens was the literary genius and I was not.” The figure of Drood first turns up at the scene of a hellish train wreck from which Dickens, 53 years old and gouty, has emerged. A suspenseful and spooky descent into the last days of Charles Dickens, who expired before he could complete his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.Īlthough he doesn’t quite have the hang of Victorian prose and writes instead with modern matter-of-factness, Simmons ( Muse of Fire, 2008, etc.) hits on a nice conceit at the outset, giving Dickens’s fellow novelist Wilkie Collins the job of narrating this long, shaggy dog of a tale. ![]()
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