UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

           The book with the most legitimate claim to being called the first English murder mystery novel is Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It also has a good claim to being called the greatest mystery, because we don’t know how it turned out, and we never will. Dickens wrote only half of it, and died just before completing the sixth monthly installment. Yet the book, incomplete as it is, still is read with interest today.

            Briefly, the plot is as follows. John Jasper, the choirmaster at Cloisterham Cathedral, is an opium addict. He seems to love his young nephew, Edwin Drood, but in fact plots to kill him because Jasper loves Drood’s fiancée Rosa. Jasper’s plan is to lay the blame at the door of an orphan pupil of one of the Cathedral’s priests, a young man who has shown that he has a hot temper and also an interest in Drood’s fiancée. On Christmas Eve, after dining with his uncle and the young man just mentioned, Drood disappears. There is no arrest but much suspicion in Cloisterham. A stranger, obviously a detective, begins to poke around the town. He finds some important clues, and there the action ends.  The mystery rests not only in the incompleteness of the text, but in its indeterminateness. Did Jasper indeed do away with Drood, as the reader suspects and as Dickens’s publisher said was the author’s intention; or did the author decide to go in another direction with, perhaps, Drood’s surprise reappearance later? And is the detective, as many readers have suspected, in disguise and a character earlier introduced in the book—perhaps a principal such as the suspected young man or even Drood himself?       

            When we speak of mysteries as a genre of popular fiction, we are talking about books in which the mystery is solved. With Drood we have a true mystery, and many readers have enjoyed the challenge of attempting to fathom the mind of the dead author. Of course, the book also has the usual variety of Dickensian types and eccentrics. There is also what I would call an uncommon point of view about the nature of crime. Dickens does not believe, as, for example,  Dostoyevsky does, that the criminal mind is interesting because it is so like our own—in fact is our own, if circumstances are right.  He thinks it is a "horrible wonder apart" from our own.  What could an innocent person “know of the criminal intellect," Dickens writes, "which its own professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a horrible wonder apart?"

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Anton Chekhov, The Shooting Party (1884)

           Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, “retired investigating magistrate,” brings a manuscript to an editor identified as “A. C.” (Chekhov published this novel serially under the name Antosha Chekhonte). The first-person narration purports to be by an investigating magistrate named Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, drinking partner of the local Count, Alexey Karneyev, but affecting to despise him. Zinovyev fancies himself an expert on women and denies his sycophancy by asserting his mental superiority to the Count.

            The Count has just returned from several years’ absence, and the first half of the book is taken up with the revels of the two men and others of the Count’s hangers-on. The characters are not pleasant and the going is fairly tedious until Olga, the pretty daughter of a local forester, makes an appearance, and both the Count and Zinovyev become infatuated with her. She, however, marries the Count’s estate manager, Urbenin, who is almost three times as old as she. On her wedding day she confesses to Zinovyev having made a terrible mistake in marrying Urbenin, and she begins an affair with the much younger Zinovyev. But after a short while she leaves her husband to live with the Count.

            At a shooting party, Olga is found stabbed some distance away from the others. Her husband is charged with the crime, and Zinovyev conducts a ham-handed investigation. Olga regains consciousness before dying, but will not name her attacker. The one-eyed servant Kuzma knows something about the crime but will not tell it to Zinovyev. Before the servant can speak with the Prosecutor who’s been called in, he is murdered in the cell where he’s being kept. Zinovyev gave free run of the jail to Urbenin before this, so Urbenin is charged with the new crime as well. Eventually he is convicted and sent to Siberia.

            In a postscript to the manuscript, the editor describes how Kamyshev returns to get the editor’s verdict on the manuscript, and how the editor then accuses him of the murders described in it. Kamyshev does not deny the accusation. Chekhov’s story thus anticipates Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) in the narrator’s being the culprit.

           

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Michael Dibdin, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978

           Today’s uncommon mystery is by Michael Dibdin.  I’ve talked before about a Michael Dibdin book called The Dying of the Light.  The amazing thing about Dibdin is that each book he writes is very different from the last, with the exception of his continuing series about Aurelio Zen, a detective in Rome.  The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, originally published in 1978 and recently reissued in a Vintage Crime paperback, is a good example of his originality. 

            Not that there’s anything unusual about this kind of book, called a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a literary work that imitates the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and pretends to continue the adventures of the character he made so famous.  The Holmes pastiche has been practiced by writers such as John Gardner and University of Louisville author Sena Jeter Naslund.  Doyle’s son Adrian Conan Doyle wrote some Holmes stories with the help of mystery author John Dickson Carr.  Probably the most successful author of Sherlock Holmes pastiches was the now-little-read Wisconsin writer August Derleth, who called his Sherlock Holmes clone Solar Pons and whose series ran to seven books. And this book, despite its title, is far from being the last Sherlock Holmes Story.

            Most Conan Doyle imitators suffer from Holmes worship; they try too hard and too reverently to portray Holmes.  The key to a good pastiche is to get away from idolatry and make the characters your own.  In this case, Dibdin makes Watson into a credible character who understands that, as he says, “Living with great men is itself a minor art.”  Watson knows his role is that of the amazed and admiring sidekick in the famous verbal exchanges in which Holmes reveals a brilliant chain of deductions.  So, when one morning the great detective surprises him by inferring that he had dinner the night before at Simpson’s in the Strand with an old friend and fellow-intern, Watson, suitably amazed, does not correct Holmes by telling him he had actually dined with his fiancée Mary Morstan at a restaurant in Mayfair.

            The Last Sherlock Holmes Story purports to be papers written by Dr. Watson not long before his death, sealed up by his bankers for fifty years, and dealing with events in the fall of 1888 when Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the Whitechapel district of London.  Dibdin welds factual details of the Ripper murders with fictional details of Holmes cases as chronicled by Arthur Conan Doyle.  The result is an ingenious solution to the murders that will shock Holmes fans.  I think you’ll like it.