The D. Case:
The Truth about the Mystery
of Edwin Drood
By Charles Dickens, Carlo Fruttero
and Franco Lucentini
Translated by Gregory Dowling
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 422 pages, $23.95
The time is now and the place is Rome. A cosmopolitan conference,
”Completeness Is All: An International Forum on the Completion of Unfinished or Fragmentary Works in Music and Literature,” is about to convene at a posh hotel. The aim of the conference is to solve by detective work, computers and other electronic gadgetry the riddle of certain unfinished masterpieces and thereby recuperate them for posterity as well as for the financial gain of the Japanese technocrats sponsoring the meeting.
Among the works, which include Puccini`s ”Turandot,” Poe`s ”Narrative of Arthur GordonPym” and Schubert`s Symphony No. 8, is Charles Dickens` last unfinished novel ”The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” On the committee to tackle the Dickens novel are a host of noteworthy but notably fictitious detectives of this century and the last, among them the meticulous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the cryptic Sherlock Holmes and the hard-drinking American gumshoe, Philip Marlowe.
But how can this be, you ask-fictitious characters of a bygone era alive today and meeting at a contemporary Roman hotel? Well, anything goes in the frolicsome world of postmodern detective fiction, known for its borrowed characters, its blend of fantasy and history, and its impudent disregard for the norms of conventional storytelling.
The first chapters are engaging enough and full of surprises. Who would expect that we ”Dear Readers” would be taken into the narrator`s confidence and invited to tag along at the ”Drood work group” meetings? Who would have thought that we would be in on all the behind-the-scenes gossip, petty jealousies, clandestine love affairs and serious sleuthing going on within their circle?
But now the real work begins. Sandwiched between the chapters devoted to detective work, to conference cocktails parties and sightseeing tours to the Roman Forum are the chapters of the real Dickens novel itself. And why not? If the detectives are studying a chapter or two of Dickens each day, and if we the readers are privy to the inquiry in progress, it only stands to reason that we too should read Dickens with them and share the responsibility for the investigation.
In alternating chapters, therefore, we first read something of Poirot and his colleagues and then of Drood, the Dickens hero, then again more about Poirot and then more about Dickens. In the Dickens novel Drood has vanished, the victim of foul play perhaps. In the novel about the novel the female Italian conference leader has disappeared with the president of the Dickens society, a victim of passion perhaps.
Many clues are dropped to help solve both mysteries-too many. Time after time false speculation lures the reader down the primrose path to a big breakthrough only to end in disappointment. As if things are not confusing enough, in the last pages of the book a third plot and several suppositions are introduced involving Dickens himself and his sudden, untimely death.
In the end, however, there will be no answers for the reader, no way out of this tangled web of evidence and multiple plots-only conjecture. ”The D. Case” is not a real mystery but a tease, a fun-loving parody of the conventional detective story. Its entertainment value rests not in discovering the end to Dickens` novel but in playfully puzzling over it with our detective colleagues in the book.
The parts not written by Dickens were written collaboratively by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, two writers who have, in the past in their native Italy, enjoyed a measure of fame for their supersleuthing.
Talented as the two author-detectives may be at keeping ahead of their readers, they are less talented at keeping up with Dickens. ”The D. Case” is easily forgotten, while the original unfinished Dickens novel which it contains remains a haunting and memorable mystery.
