Dickens died at his writing desk in June 1870, halfway through the serialized publication of his final novel, and took the solution to its central murder mystery with him. Edwin Drood stops mid-plot, mid-suspicion, with an opium-addicted choirmaster who almost certainly killed his own nephew — and a hundred and fifty years of critics, novelists, and Dickens societies still arguing over exactly how the missing chapters would have played out.
It’s a strange final note for a writer who normally tied up every thread with theatrical precision: his one true mystery novel, in a body of work not otherwise known for whodunits, cut off at the exact moment it might have proven he could out-plot the genre he’d never fully attempted before.
Read alongside the rest of Dickens’s Victorian London, Drood is less a finished detective story than a haunting glimpse of the writer he might have kept becoming.
Read The Mystery of Edwin Drood →
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