The mystery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood - setting aside assumptions

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) might make a good test case for what misleading assumptions can do to a novel.  Charles Dickens’s final novel looks like a mystery, acts like a mystery, and is titled Mystery, but it is in fact probably not a mystery novel, except that it is.  Because the novel is unfinished – we have half of it – there is no way to decisively prove that it is or is not a mystery (which it is (not)).

I can decipher my own gibberish.  Edwin Drood is now a mystery novel, without a doubt.  It is the third entry in H. R. F. Keating’s Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, for example, preceded (the list is chronological) by Poe and The Moonstone.  If people who read and write mysteries call it a mystery novel, it is.  Genres and canons form retrospectively.  And the novel has a murder, suspects, clues, a detective – or it probably has these things.  Later writers of mysteries learned from it, imitated it, and turned it into a mystery novel.

I have no idea when people started calling detective novels and crime fiction “mysteries,” when there was a genre known as “mysteries.”  In England in the 1920s it can seem like every third novel published has the word “mystery” in the title, but before then?  Sherlock Holmes always has “adventures.”  Perhaps a passerby will know the answer to this question.

But there was no mystery genre in 1870, even though Dickens was helping create it.  If I read the novel as a generic mystery I begin creating problems for myself.  The mystery has a straightforward solution (mad choirmaster and opium addict John Jasper murders his nephew Edwin but in such a way as to throw suspicion on another) but the conventions of the mystery novel, of our mystery novel, almost demand that the plain answer is not the actual answer, and that all of the fairly blatant clues are red herrings or tricks.

The result has been a series of continuations and ingenious theorizing which is all, admittedly, a lot of fun.  Angus Wilson wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition I read, and he describes a favorite example, Felix Aylmer’s The Drood Case (1964), in which Jasper is defended  with “a complicated, closely argued, but to me inherently improbable solution based upon the old Islamic family feud code” (13).  I love this sort of thing – I wish this were the solution!

But then I remind myself that 1) Edwin Drood is almost certainly not a puzzle mystery, and that 2) it was written by Charles Dickens, a writer whose methods and purposes are well understood and who was not going to make too wild of a leap in novel #15, although he sure as heck does not stand still.  In particular, Edwin Drood  contains all sorts of fascinating expansions and revisions of the some of the major themes of Dickens’s previous novel, Our Mutual Friend.  It would be a shame to toss all of that aside for a puzzle mystery.

Not that I know I am right.  Perhaps more novels should remain unfinished.  No, I suppose I believe that the author is better at finishing his own story than I am, even when the author is a notch or ten less inventive than Charles Dickens.