Recommendations
Books Like The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Best books to read after The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens's unfinished final novel (1870) is the greatest puzzle in English fiction — John Jasper's opium addiction, Edwin Drood's mysterious disappearance, and a detective plot Dickens never completed. These recommendations extend the experience through Dickens's completed detective fiction, through Victorian sensation novels, and through fiction that explores the double life and the divided self.
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's completed detective novel — Inspector Bucket is the first professional detective in English fiction, and Bleak House's detective plot (who killed Tulkinghorn?) gives Drood readers the satisfaction of a Dickens mystery actually resolved; the essential companion to the unfinished Drood.
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Collins was Dickens's closest literary friend and the writer who most directly developed the sensation-detective novel that Drood participates in — The Woman in White's mystery plot, its villain Count Fosco, and its cathedral city setting (Limmeridge) share the Drood atmosphere in the completed form that Drood lacks.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's novella inherits the divided-self theme that John Jasper embodies — the respectable Victorian professional whose secret life is criminal; Jekyll and Hyde is the literary development of exactly the psychological type that Dickens was exploring in Jasper, published sixteen years after Dickens's death.
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The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's novel, dedicated to Dickens, is generally regarded as the first full detective novel in English and the missing companion to Drood — where Drood offers a detective plot without a solution, The Moonstone provides the solution and shows what the complete version of the Victorian detective novel looks like.
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Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's final completed novel and the most useful context for Edwin Drood — both novels are interested in false identity (characters who pretend to be dead or different from what they are), and Our Mutual Friend's John Harmon subplot (the man who fakes his own death) is directly relevant to the question of whether Edwin is actually dead.
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Illustrated)
by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens's own unfinished text, illustrated by Luke Fildes, with the notes and memoranda Dickens left behind — reading the text alongside the illustrator's account of Dickens's intentions (Fildes reported that Dickens told him Jasper would be shown strangling Edwin with his scarf in a later illustration) is essential context for the puzzle.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's Gothic mystery inherits the Drood atmosphere — the brooding male character whose surface respectability conceals dark obsession, the isolated setting that becomes threatening, the detective plot organized around what actually happened in the past; the twentieth-century descendant of the Victorian Gothic mystery.
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Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens
The Dickens novel that most anticipates Edwin Drood's psychological darkness — Miss Wade's self-tormented psychology and Rigaud's theatrical villainy are the nearest Dickens came (in completed form) to the kind of psychological criminal he was attempting in Jasper; essential context for understanding Drood's ambition.
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