Now we have suggested endings by two masters of mystery fiction offered us in the same year: Leon Garfield's invention of the final chapters as Dickens might have written them (to be published on March 15) and Charles Forsyte's conclusion, drafted in a contemporary idiom. In 1964 the well-known English actor and devout Dickensian, Felix Aylmer, offered the most ingenious and carefully worked approach of all, as Charles Forsyte says in ''The Decoding of Edwin Drood,'' an Agatha Christie solution which turned Dickens's book, as we now have it, upside down. This theory was to play a large part in Edmund Wilson's famous essay on Dickens in ''The Wound and the Bow'' (1941). In 1930 Howard Duffield offered the principal American solution, that Jasper was supposed to be a member of the Hindu sect known as the Thugs, who were devotees of Kali, the goddess of destruction. Matz published in The Dickensian in 1911 notes 82 such attempts, and Matz's daughter Winifred added a further 135 by 1929. It is hardly surprising that critics ever since have occupied themselves with suggesting - or ''proving,'' as so many of them thought - what had been the author's intended ending. Is it murder? Is the obvious man, Landless, the villain? Or is it the seemingly respectable, opiumtaking Jasper, whom we soon learn is passionately in love with his ward's betrothed? Then comes the disappearance of Jasper's ward, Edwin Drood, a young man in his early 20's, after a supper at his guardian's and a tipsy quarrel with another young man, Neville Landless, who has come from Ceylon to be tutored in Latin and Greek by the manly, sports-loving dean of the cathedral, Crisparkle. The same man, yes, but apparently without conscious awareness of his other life. We soon learn, however, that this same man is Jasper, the courtly, talented, wellbred choirmaster of the cathedral. Nevertheless, the novel opens in an opium den, and, indeed, in the opium dreams of an educated man in a lowdown district of east London. Dickens, with ill health and depleted energies, spent a great part of his time in a country house he had acquired in that very county. The setting was for him a new and narrow one - the society of the cathedral close of a provincial town in the county of Kent. When he died very suddenly of a stroke on June 8th of the same year, only six numbers were completed. The first installment appeared in his weekly All the Year Round in April 1870. $10.95.ĬHARLES DICKENS planned to produce ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood'' in 12 monthly parts. THE DECODING OF EDWIN DROOD By Charles Forsyte. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD By Charles Dickens.
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