Word: drood
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...MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD...
...news, a melancholy world grieves for itself: there will be no more rumbustious squires, no more hilarious cockneys, no more sneaking, slavering villains or appealing waifs, no more enchantments at all from the man who correctly dubbed his own work "inimitable." His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, its sentences as convoluted as London streets, its title ominously resonant of "dread" and "mood," lies half done: 23 chapters and some scattered notes. Like such unfinished masterpieces as Schubert's Eighth Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Drood powerfully intrigues readers...
None of the attempts to solve the Drood mystery is an aesthetic or financial success. George Bernard Shaw offers a reason: the novel was "a gesture by a man already three-quarters dead." Novelist J.B. Priestley counters, "Three-quarters dead though he might be, he was feeling his way towards yet another sort of fiction." That fiction is the modern mystery story, with its careful plotting, its characters subordinate to story, and its yielding of surprises as the drama moves toward denouement. To that end, Dickens wrote the only one of his work that can be summarized (although...
...Society. The teeming streets of London helped lend shape to Dickens' lifelong, horrified fascination with the submerged of Victorian society-the poor, the grotesque, especially the criminal. A long line of murderers stalk through Dickens' novels, from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist to John Jasper in Edwin Drood. Among other things, they embody his belief in an irredeemable evil in human nature-a belief that tends to be forgotten because of the hilarity Dickens spread through even his darkest passages...
...intellectual athlete, and socially he was a marvel of mobility, at home with scholars, society bluebloods, police inspectors. "Holmes," wrote Social Historian David Bazelon, "despite his eccentricities, is essentially an English gentleman acting to preserve a moral way of life." From Dickens' unfinished teaser, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to the 20th century whimsy of Dorothy L. Sayers, crime was cleaned up until it became an intellectual puzzle, as safe for the amusement of high-chokered ladies as it was satisfying to the fantasies of high-angled gentlemen...