Drood

Opium Dreams?Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and his mysterious Drood"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was the strange novel left half-finished (six of the twelve planned serial numbers complete with none of the usual outline and notes for the rest of the planned length) when Charles Dickens died as a relatively young man of 58. Since then many authors and literary professors have tried to finish Drood or speculate on Dickens's planned ending.

Five years before his death, a great train accident that Dickens narrowly escaped had left him physically weakened and emotionally fragile. Simmons uses this as the historical starting point for his own Drood, which doesn't attempt to complete the story (although it does suggest an outline of how Dickens might have finished it) but rather tells how Dickens came to start it.

The story, both Dickens's and Sinmons's, revolve around Wilkie Collins, Dicken's friend and fellow author in real life, who is best known for his ground-breaking mystery "The Moonstone", widely considered the first detective fiction and which spawned the monstrous mystery genre that now rivals or exceeds the shelf footage of general fiction in every book store and library. While close friends, Collins and Dickens drifted apart in those last give years of Dickens's life. Collins was a Victorian rebel, living with two different women at the same time and marrying neither, and a heavy user of laudanum, an opium and alcohol brew used medicinally and abused recreationally by gentlemen who could find, afford, and needed such release from physical and mental pain.

Simmons's Drood is written in the form of a first-person narrative sealed for 125 years after the death of its author Collins, when it will be released to the public, wherein Collins tells the story of his friendship with Dickens and why it deteriorated after the nearly tragic train wreck. We find (as told through Collins' opium-soaked pen) that Drood was a real person whom Dickens encountered at the train wreck, and who helped Dickens extract survivors and pull them to safey--or to death. As Dickens tells the story to Collins, he is not sure.

The rest of the story is Collins's account of how he and Dickens tried to find Drood and then to kill him. There are trips to the deepest slums of London, the vilest opium dens, and below the streets to the slums and "Undertown" beneath London's dark, dirty, fog-shrouded streets. There are mysterious private detectives, foreboding visions and dream, and romantic entangles between Collins and his two paramours and Dickens and his own mistress. There are moments of collaboration and confrontation between two strong personalities both secure in their professional abilities yet competitive in their seeking for public success and adulation (the factual and fictional Collins were both bound to be losers in this regard to the most beloved and most read writer in English history not named William Shakespeare).

Through it all, the reader must remember that the tale is told by a man often controlled by a powerful addiction assuaged only by higher and higher doses of his laudanum, opium, and finally morphine. Simmons keeps the story boiling (a bit too long, perhaps, although the florid writing style is appropriate to the time and the author Collins, noted for his florid Gothic turn) and the reader guessing at what is real, what has happened and what may in the end be merely opium dreams. Simmons's account is solidly based in the biographies of the two writers and the history of their relationship, and suggests interesting and sometimes plausible reasons for both their cooling relationship and Dickes's rapid aging and failing health after the train wreck.

But more than anything, Simmons is an entertainer, not a historian, so keep the history in its place and enjoy the tale as Simmons rolls it out.