The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It
The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It

Author: Pete Orford

Publisher: Grub Street Publishers

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1526724375

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A tantalizing tour through a true bibliomystery that will “get people talking about one of literature’s greatest enigmas” (KentOnline). When Dickens died on June 9, 1870, he was halfway through writing his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Since that time, hundreds of academics, fans, authors, and playwrights have presented their own conclusion to this literary puzzler. Step into 150 years of Dickensian speculation to see how our attitudes both to Dickens and his mystifying last work have developed. At first, enterprising authors tried to cash in on an opportunity to finish Dickens’ book. Dogged attempts of early twentieth-century detectives proved Drood to be the greatest mystery of all time. Earnest academics of the mid-century reinvented Dickens as a modernist writer. Today, the glorious irreverence of modern bibliophiles reveals just how far people will go in their quest to find an ending worthy of Dickens. Whether you are a die-hard Drood fan or new to the controversy, Dickens scholar Pete Orford guides readers through the tangled web of theories and counter-theories surrounding this great literary riddle. From novels to websites; musicals to public trials; and academic tomes to erotic fiction, one thing is certain: there is no end to the inventiveness with which we redefine Dickens’ final story, and its enduring mystery.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Author: A.N. Wilson

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0062954962

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Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

Women of Mystery
Women of Mystery

Author: Martha Hailey DuBose

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2000-12-11

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0312276559

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In this remarkable book, Martha Hailey DuBose has given those multitudes of readers who love the mystery novel an indispensable addition to their libraries. Unlike other works on the subject, Women of Mystery is not merely a directory of the novelists and their publications with a few biographical details. DuBose combines extensive research into the lives of significant women mystery writers from Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart with critical essays on their work, anecdotes, contemporary reviews and opinions and some of the women's own comments. She takes us through the Golden Age of the British women mystery writers, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and Tey, to the leading crime novelists of today, focused on the women who have become legends of the genre. And though she laments, "so many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort a mentioning "some of the best of the rest." When DuBose writes of the lives of her principal players, she relates them to their times, their families, their personal situations and above all to their books. She subtly points out that Sayers, whose experience with the men in her life was inevitably disastrous, created in Lord Peter the ideal lover -- one who is all that a woman desires and needs. DuBose gives us the curriculum vitae that Dorothy Sayers created to help her bring Peter Wimsey to a virtual actuality. Ngaio Marsh would give up an active presence in the theatrical world she loved, but she recreated it for herself as well as her readers in many of her novels. The biographies of these woman are as engrossing as the stories they wrote, and Martha DuBose has shined a different, intimate and intriguing light on them, their works, and the lives that informed those works. This book is so full of treasure it's hard to see how any mystery enthusiast will be able to do without it. And what a gift it would make for anyone on your list who has been heard to announce "I love a mystery." Some of the treats inside: In the Beginning: The Mothers of Detection Anna Katherine Green Mary Roberts Rinehart A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Josephine Tey Modern Motives: Mysteries of the Murderous Mind Patricia Highsmith P.D. James Ruth Rendell Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton and more!!

The Edwin Drood Murders
The Edwin Drood Murders

Author: Christopher Lord

Publisher: Harrison Thurman Book

Published: 2013-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780985323639

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The Droodists have arrived in Dickens Junction. Local bookstore owner Simon Alastair has his hands full in his role as co-chair for the latest convention honoring Charles Dickens's uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A movie star, a pesky blogger, dueling scholars, a stage hypnotist, and an old family friend (among others) all have claims on Simon's time. In addition, some Droodists are clearly more-or less-than they appear, including a mysterious young man by the improbable name of Edwin Drood. When a priceless ring and a rare Dickensian artifact go missing, Simon and his reporter-partner Zach Benjamin learn that someone will do anything-including murder-to obtain an object of desire. The Edwin Drood Murders is the new entry in the Dickens Junction mystery series that began with The Christmas Carol Murders, a book that New York Times thriller writer Chelsea Cain called "a love letter to both Dickens and to the small town amateur detectives who've kept the peace in hamlets from River Heights to Cabot Cove."

The Quincunx
The Quincunx

Author: Charles Palliser

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 1990-11-27

Total Pages: 802

ISBN-13: 0345371135

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An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Bookman's Tale
The Bookman's Tale

Author: Charlie Lovett

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1101622806

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A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love. Charlie Lovett’s new book, The Lost Book of the Grail, is now available. Guaranteed to capture the hearts of everyone who truly loves books, The Bookman’s Tale is a former bookseller’s sparkling novel and a delightful exploration of one of literature’s most tantalizing mysteries with echoes of Shadow of the Wind and A.S. Byatt's Possession. Nine months after the death of his beloved wife Amanda left him shattered, Peter Byerly, a young antiquarian bookseller, relocates from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to outrun his grief and rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, he discovers a Victorian watercolor of a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Amanda. Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture’s origins and braves a host of dangers to follow a trail of clues back across the centuries—all the way to Shakespeare’s time and a priceless literary artifact that could prove, once and for all, the truth about the Bard’s real identity.

The Routledge History of Literature in English
The Routledge History of Literature in English

Author: Ronald Carter

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 9780415243179

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This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

The Edge of the Unknown
The Edge of the Unknown

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Publisher: FV Éditions

Published: 2017-01-16

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

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In 1916 Arthur Conan Doyle stated his belief in Spiritualism. "The Edge of the Unknown", first published in 1930, is a collection of articles covering various aspects of this subject.