It was as year ago, the Christmas season before this last one, that I finally sat down to read Dickens' last and infamously unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was one of the few I hadn't read, but I knew about some of it, of course, how a character with an opium problem named John Jasper, was the suspected murderer, and that the alleged victim, one Edwin Drood, simply vanished one dreary Christmas eve. And I knew there had been many uncanonical conclusions to Edwin Drood, including one by Leon Garfield, writer of YA novels about the American Revolution, and one reputed to have been dictated by Dickens' ghost, though the writing styles didn't match up. I'd seen a few scenes of one movie adaptation on youtube, but that had been all.
Actually reading the book was a bit of a surprise. Neville Landless, one of the two rivals for Rosa Budd's affection, and his sister Helena are from British-ruled Ceylon (now called Sri lanka), and are presumably at least part native in origin. Now, seeing that clip years ago, I noticed the ethnicity of the brother and sister, and assumed to was a case of "race-swapping" (as was done with a recent adaptation of David Copperfield. It was not. Dickens has been criticized for his supposed lack of sympathy for colonized peoples, but this novel appears to take up the challenge of colonialism. The Landless siblings have experienced British colonialism first-hand, and the rivalry between Landless and Drood involves a spat between them wherein Drood, otherwise a sympathetic character, expresses racist attitudes (though that word was not used then, of course). Modern audiences might be less likely to forgive Edwin his colonialist attitudes then the audience in the time when Drood was written. As said, Edwin is otherwise pretty sympathetic, as he and Rosa are both orphans, are similar to the persecuted young couple often found in romances of this sort--in this case, the obvious villain being Edwin's uncle Jasper, with his obvious but unwanted designs on Rose.
Well, Jasper goes missing that Christmas eve, and the descriptions of the night of his disappearance are very rich here, as one might expect from Dickens. Neville, of course, is accosted almost immediately the next morning, having been the last person seen with Drood--and of course, the fact of his being a foreigner, and (presumably) a Southeast Asian. Not that suspicion doesn't also hover about Uncle Jasper, and Dickens' gives a few clues that point to his guilt, especially his reaction to the news from Mr. Grewgious (who had saved Landless for lack of evidence) that Rosa had decided not to wed Jasper's nephew after all. Edwin Drood's pocket watch is discovered in the river, pointing to his possible drowning, but no body turns up. Was Dickens indeed hinting at Jasper's guilt, or was he using him as red herring? If not Jasper, who else? Durdles, the local cryptkeeper, who knows secret of disposing of unwanted corpses? Bazzard, Gregrious's clerk, who is a very odd man by his employer's admission? Well, it's just that name sounds a bit odious ( too similar to 'buzzard'), and Dickens like to play with names.
Only the two rivels had any clear motivation though, and the 'red herring' character is likely a more or less modern invention. Some of Dickens' works bears similarity to the detective genre, but it didn't really exist as such back then, which means the author was likely not trying to mislead the audience. Then there is (also fairly modern) cliche that the supposed victim would turn up alive, though this, too, seems unlikely.
Dickens' son Charles is reported as saying as much (that Jasper was indeed the guilty), so perhaps the mystery of Edwin Drood, wasn't all that mysteriously. And yet, being unfinished, we'll never quite no for sure. So there's plenty of fodder here for what could have happened to Drood, no matter what Dickens intended. Again, the challenge to colonialism was quite unexpected.
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