A perfect mystery

In a delightful article for CRISIS about The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sean Fitzpatrick argues:

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a partial mystery and therefore a perfect mystery. Those who have read mystery stories from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot will know that the solution is never as wonderful as the problem. As it stands, the story of Edwin Drood is half told, with six parts out of an intended twelve drafted. In some of the final words to fall from Dickens’ pen, Datchery the detective has his epiphany before famously falling to his breakfast with an appetite. The line he scores in chalk in the cupboard door beforehand is a boundary that the world may never cross into a tale that will never be told. This murder will never out. The clues will never be separated from the blinds. The mystery of Drood will remain inviolate and eternal, retaining that perfection of mystery, that sense of immortality.

Comments

[Christopher Lord]

Of course I hate to be picky, but actually Dickens did not finish part VI; he had one more chapter planned that had not even been given a title. After his death, John Forster fiddled around with the unpublished parts, restored some text that Dickens had cut in the proof stage, and renumbered and renamed some chapters in order to fill out the pages for six parts. So the book is not quite truly half-finished, but close. But any publicity about Drood is a good thing...