I’m glad I read it. But honestly, I didn’t find it very satisfying, as a mystery. It seemed to me that Dickens just didn’t have the right temperament to write a good mystery. I think it should have been called the ‘Murder of Edwin Drood’, because there was no mystery
There was absolutely no subtly or finesse in the book. So many melodramatic facial expressions! And he’s so worried that we’re too thick to ‘get it’, that he always tells us how the person who witnessed an important event will remember and reflect on it later.
Within a couple of chapters you know that Jasper plans to kill Edwin, and set up Neville. There are never any surprises, because he overwrites every scene. We can’t even wonder if Edwin actually slipped off and went to Egypt, because he has Jasper directly tell the opium seller that he completed the act. I don’t think it’s just a reflection of the time in which he wrote. Sherlock Holmes was published not long afterwards.
I also don’t think all the finger pointings at Jasper were red herrings. I think
gmw and
Bookworm_Girl have it right, and Dickens was more interested in exploring how a man like Jasper could commit a such crime, than constructing a good mystery.
As
Bookpossum says though, there are many things left unfinished, and it’s fun to try and guess just where Dickens was headed. Who was Dick Datchery? Did Mr. Grewgious hire him to catch Jasper?
My unanswered question is what the heck did Jasper do after he drugged Durdles? I couldn’t see how that helped him any, since Durdles kept the keys to the crypt.