words in scarlet ink

I’m a sucker for historical mysteries. I’m a bigger sucker for historical mysteries about lost manuscripts.

This started in college when I read Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell. It followed protagonist and heroine Kate Stanley as she directed a Shakespeare play and chased the possibility of finding one of Shakespeare’s lost plays. She later wrote another one called Haunt Me Still.

Kate’s a bit of a Mary Sue but I really liked the premise of both stories so I was willing to overlook this.

I read another book, with the protagonist also chasing a lost Shakespeare play.  It was called The Book of Air and Shadows by (I think) Michael Gruber…and it was terrible. Too much about the protagonist’s screwed up life and not enough anything interesting.

There are probably more of these books out there, but I haven’t read them.

What I have read was another book by Matthew Pearl, his first one, called The Dante Club. This was also back in college (I had so much time to read in college. DAMN I MISS YOU, LEISURE TIME!) But The Dante Club wasn’t as much a mystery about a lost manuscript as it was a murder solved by real life historical characters (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, etc)…

I remember that I rather enjoyed that book at the time I was reading it…someone was committing murders in the fashion of atrocities against souls in Dante’s Inferno. But unlike other mysteries, I didn’t remember the end and had to look it up on Wikipedia. It was good, but it wasn’t THAT good.

But The Last Dickens IS about a missing manuscript…well, not missing, but incomplete.

Charles Dickens died of what was most likely a stroke before he completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which to this day remains one of literature’s greatest mysteries. Was Drood really dead, killed by his uncle? Or was he to triumphantly return?

In the story, Dickens’s American publisher, JT Fields, and Fields’ most capable assistant, Rebecca, go to England to try to track down the rest of the Drood story – if there is more.

The story alternates between the present day, where Fields and Rebecca are searching for answers, and Dickens’ farewell tour in the United States two or three years earlier. The stories intertwine, Fields is involved in both.

It’s an incredibly well researched story – a lot of the historical events really took place and the characters are based extensively on available records about them at the time. Dickens and his team for example, and Fields as well.

My favorite part of the book was probably Rebecca, who was smart and sophisticated and saved Fields a couple of times. Aside from trying to find the end of the last book Dickens wrote, there was a parallel mystery going on about who was following Fields and Rebecca and why. The book opens with Rebecca’s brother’s murder, and goes on from there.

Overall, I enjoyed The Last Dickens, just as I enjoyed The Dante Club. How good was it? I don’t know exactly, but considering that the details are already beginning to fade, it was probably just like the last one. Good, but not THAT good.