The Mystery of Edwin Drood by David Madden

When Dickens suddenly collapsed and died, in June 1870, he left one half of a novel which would have been his best for a decade, and left generations of readers frustrated. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is partly a sensation novel in the manner of Wilkie Collins, and partly a study of the criminal mind. The central character, John Jasper, is a respectable Anglican choirmaster in a quiet cathedral town. But he regularly sneaks off to a sordid opium den in London, and is probably a murderer; the novel strongly suggests that out of sexual jealousy he has made away with his nephew Edwin, whom he appears to love. How would it have ended?

Scores of people have tried to solve the mystery, and some have gone so far as to finish the novel themselves; the best versions (both 1980) are by Leon Garfield and Charles Forsyte. Actually Dickens left a number of clues, and we can work out roughly what would have happened. For several years, he himself had been leading a double life. He was a revered public figure and family man who was passionately in love with a younger woman, a fact which no one was supposed to know. The secrecy, his appalling workload and constant furtive journeys between his official base and the cottage in Slough where he lived under the name of Mr Tringham probably helped to kill him. Jasper, it seems, was conceived as a Jekyll and Hyde figure, a man whose left hand doesn’t know what his right hand does. Dickens’ daughter said that he ‘was quite as deeply fascinated and absorbed in the study of the criminal Jasper, as in the dark and sinister crime that has given the book its title’. The last chapters would have been set in the condemned cell, and there the murderer would review his career ‘as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted’.

Unlike some people, I think that the fragment Edwin Drood is a wonderful half-novel, and am always looking for the perfect solution, so I enjoyed David Madden’s new book. He has written a second half about as long as the first half, broken it into instalments – as did Dickens – to keep up the tension, and made a brave effort to imitate Dickens’ style. He has not, however, done exactly what Dickens intended. I don’t want to spoil it for other readers, but will just say that this novel does not end in the condemned cell, and that Jasper does not describe his crime as if it had been done by someone else. The method of the murder seems improbable, too. But it is thoroughly readable and, sometimes, powerful – not quite as good as Garfield and Forsyte, but good.

The bicentenary of Dickens’ birth is in February 2012, and BBC2 is going to screen yet one more finished version of Edwin Drood. I hope for the best.