Edwin Drood and the National Art Library

It's many years since I had the pleasure of a leisurely look round the V&A in London, and I must admit that I've scarcely been aware of the existence, behind the museum's impressve facade, of the National Art Library. However, I've now made up for lost time by visiting the NAL, although a full visit to the V&A will have to wait till another day.

The highlight of my trip was the privilege of seeing for myself Charles Dickens' manuscript for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This was a genuine treat - the great man's last, incomplete book, in his own hand (with innumerable corrections) and presented very well in a vast bound tome into which the pages (already pasted in the past) had been inserted. It felt quite poignant, looking at the last words Dickens ever wrote. I also love the page when he is jotting down different possible titles for his book.

The National Art Library houses a good many Dickens works, and I also saw a bound volume of the Drood instalments, plus an impressive new binding for the book that has been created specially by a leading artist. Thankfully, too, there are images of Drood online so everyone can get an idea of what the manuscript is like. But I do urge anyone who can do so to visit the Library itself. Its atmosphere is wonderful, and it deserves to be celebrated.

I did get the chance of a quick look at an exhibition covering Walter Sickert and his paintings of the Old Bedford Music Hall. This is a very good exhibition, if necessarily small. Quite apart from its associations with Sickert (said by Patricia Cornwell to be Jack the Ripper, but on rather slender evidence) the Bedford was very familiar to Belle Elmore, the music hall "artiste" and her husband - Dr H.H. Crippen.

Unfinished

Unfinished, presented by Alastair Sooke, was shown by the BBC to coincide with its airing of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sooke, who is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph, started with Droodism, and interviewed the screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes, before moving on to consider other unfinished works, continuations of characters or story-lines begun by others, and other variations on the theme of completion (or its absence.)

His range was broad, taking in Sanditon by Jane Austen, a portrait of George Washington, poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Franz Kafka, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and The Sopranos. There might be a risk that such diversity would lead to superficiality, but Sooke managed to surmount the hurdle with ease, presenting in an intelligent yet accessible and engaging style that made the programme quite fascinating.

I found that my thoughts were provoked on several levels. This is a subject that has intrigued me ever since I finished Bill Knox’s The Lazarus Widow, and I was also shown an incomplete manuscript by another deceased writer some time ago, which I felt was too fragmentary to complete in a meaningful way. Jill Paton Walsh has, impressively, finished one Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and written two others, and her work in this field is also fascinating, though it did not earn a mention in the programme. Has anyone ever written a novel about an unfinished book? I am sure it must have been done plenty of times, but off-hand I can’t call any examples to mind.

One final point about Alastair Sooke. I’d never heard of him before this programme, but I did take to him, and towards the end of the show, I suddenly realised why. Odd as it may seem, he reminded me, just a bit, of my personal vision of Daniel Kind.

Forgotten Book - End Game

The Mystery of Edwin Drood's appearance on BBC 2 this week inspires my choice of a non-fiction Forgotten Book today - it is End Game by Richard F. Stewart, who was almost universally known as Dick Stewart. Dick, who died not too long ago, was a great guy. I used to visit his home in South Manchester, sometimes taking my long-suffering son along, and buy books from him. He and his wife made a delightful couple, and Jonathan still remembers those visits as happy occasions, because the Stewarts were so kind to him. I miss those visits a lot.

Anyway, back to End Game, which was published in 1999 by a very enterprising small publisher. Dick's idea was to list and assess all the main solutions to the Drood mystery, as well as all the completions actually written, and the commentaries. He acknowledges at the outset that so much has been written about Drood that a totally comprehensive account is impossible, but this is still a very substantial volume.

Dick quotes G.K. Chesterton's excellent line that "the only one of Dickens's novels which he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing" - the story is a pleasing, if tantalising paradox. He lists eight basic questions that anyone trying to solve the puzzle needs to address. They admit of many answers. "Droodism has become a productive cottage industry during the 20th century", he notes, and of course this has continued into the 21st century.

All manner of sleuths have over the years, as Dick says, invoked "mesmerism, telepathy, serial photography, Thuggee, Sherlock Holmes and schizophrenia (to name but a few) in the search for a solution. The composer Rupert Holmes, one of whose excellent songs I featured in The Serpent Pool, wrote a musical based on the story. It's a great game, and Dick Stewart's book is a fascinating guide to it. Dick inscribed my copy "All you never wanted to know about Edwin Drood". Too modest, as he always was.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood - review

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a two-part BBC TV adaptation of Charles Dickens' last, unfinished novel. It's a very long time since I read the original, but it's always fascinated me that Dickens moved in the direction of the crime and mystery genre in the later part of his career. Bleak House is one of my favourite novels, not only because of its portrayal of legal life, and the endless litigation of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, but also because of the part played by Inspector Bucket, a splendid character. Dickens was, like his friend Wilkie Collins, very interested in true crime, as well as having his imagination sparked by an element of mystery.

I've often wondered if, had he lived, Dickens would have made a greater contribution to the development of the crime genre - it is, surely, highly probable. In the past, I've published two short stories featuring the great man, once detecting alongside Collins, and once in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell. They were great fun to write, and one of these days, I might do another.

Back to the BBC TV show. The screenplay was written by Gwyneth Hughes, who once wrote a screenplay for The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, in which Diana Rigg was unexpectedly cast as Gladys Mitchell's saurian detective. But the mood here was far removed from Golden Age territory - it was dark, hallucinatory and (or is there a twist up Hughes' sleeve?) a study of crime rather than a whodunit.

Matthew Rhys was impressive as the opium-tormented John Jasper, and Freddie Fox, from the famous acting family, played Edwin. The first episode began with a nightmare and ended with a killing. Yet the action was stripped down and this meant that the development of the story was not as labyrinthine as I'd rather expected. Writing this post immediately after watching, I still feel as though I want to mull over my reaction to this particular take on the story. But it has gripped me sufficiently for me to be keen to watch episode two tomorrow.