The D. Case: Or The Truth About The Mystery Of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens

A chance to re-read Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is Dickens' last (unfinished) novel and his best, excepting Pickwick Papers. With a wonderful array of characters, including the minor ones like Honeythunder and the incomparable (outside of Dickens' works) Deputy it is a pleasure to read and re-read. By itself of course a 5-star book! The D case has fictional detectives gathered in Rome, attending a conference where the aim is to "finish" the mystery story. The authors' solution is witty and interesting. However, much of the story is dated because it is poking fun at whizz-bang Japanese technology. Furthermore most of the detectives are not well portrayed (at least in the English translation). All in all an enjoyable book, by itself 3-star.

What the Dickens!?!?

In this book, a group of fictional detectives (mostly famous, but with a few obscure ones) are assembled in Rome to solve "The Mystery of Edwin Dood". "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was Charles Dickens' last book, which he died before completing. This book reprints "Drood" in it's unfinished entirety, interupted periodically by the detectives discussing the "case". I found the book (both "Drood" and the new bits with Sherlock Holmes and company) to be quite entertaining. Does the book provide a "definitive" sollution to "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"? No, but it's an imaginative sollution that is plausible. Dickens fans should enjoy this book.

3 stars for the Dickens, 4 stars for the Fruttero/Lucentini

A rather interesting book, "The D Case" contains the incomplete manuscript of Charles Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" interleaved with Fruttero & Lucentini's fictionalized examination of what the solution to the unsolved mystery is. "Edwin Drood" was Dickens' last, and probably weakest novel. It just isn't a very interesting read. Read it alone, and you probably won't care what happened to Edwin Drood. What F & L do is cover all the various ideas scholars have had over 'whodunnit', by putting the arguments in the mouths of all the great fictional sleuths of the last 100 years+ working as a team. A much more interesting way to follow the discussion about the book than reading formal articles in Lit Journals. In the end, F & L's detectives present a new and interesting solution to the title crime, and in addition, reveal a new crime no one suspected, the murder of Dickens himself, along with the culprit! Sound farfetched? Try it, you'll like it.

The reason I don't give this 5 stars is the poor depiction of the fictional dectectives. With the exception of Hercule Poirot, none of them talk like they did in the orginal works they appeared in. Whether this is the fault of F & L, or the fault of the translator, I don't know. Regardless, it weakens the book.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a wonderful book. The last book of Charles Dickens' work. He wrote this book before he died but never ended it because he died before he did. This book is a very educational, and hard book to read, but it's really worth it. I strongly recommend you to read this.