Word: edwin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Edwin Warner. Reported by Don Sider/ Washington
...MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD...
...hearing the 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...
...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 in his case that is like reversing an oak into a nutshell): John Jasper, choirmaster, lusts after Rosa Bud, betrothed to his nephew Edwin Drood. When Drood disappears, a young rival for Rosa Bud, Neville Landless, is accused of murder. Because no body is found, Landless is released. Enter the ostentatiously mysterious Datchery, an old man with juvenile energy. Is he disguised? Is he a detective? Is he a woman? Is he Drood himself? Through...
...year 1980, with a coincidence so uncanny that Charles Dickens might have written it, not one but two Edwin Drood continuations appear. The Decoding of Edwin Drood (Scribners; $10.95) is written by Charles Forsyte, the nom de plume for a husband-and-wife team of British mystery writers. The Forsyte book picks up where Dickens departed but omits the preceding chapters. The reader is left with only the latter half of the novel, composed without the tone or richness of its predecessor. The reader might well sigh with Kate Perugini, Dickens' daughter: "In my father's grave lies...