The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot

The greatest unfinished mystery in English literature gets its first great detective: not a policeman, but Andrew Lang, the legendary folklorist and literary sleuth who turned his formidable analytical powers onto Charles Dickens's final, tantalizingly incomplete novel. 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' was left half-told when Dickens died in 1870, and for generations, readers have obsessed over what really happened to the young man who vanished into the opium fog of Victorian London. Lang methodically dissects the novel's tangled web of suspect relationships: the sinister opium dealer Jasper and his obsessive fixation on the beautiful Rosa; the enigmatic Princess Puffer and her mysterious knowledge; the fateful engagement ring that may prove Edwin dead or alive. This 1905 analysis captures a unique moment in literary history, when the mystery was still fresh, theories were still forming, and the wound of Dickens's untimely death still ached. Lang brings his characteristic wit and rigor to the question that has haunted Dickensians for over a century: who killed Edwin Drood, and did he die at all?