A student essay, in which the future Kay Scarpetta author set out to name the killer in Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, has gone on display in London
Years before forensic pathologist-sleuth Kay Scarpetta was applying her finely-tuned mind to stopping the serial killers who plague Richmond, Virginia and its environs, her creator Patricia Cornwell was setting her sights on solving a mystery that has frustrated the literary world for more than a century: what happened to Edwin Drood, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel?
Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood centres on the hypocritical choirmaster John Jasper, a man who spends his time in opium dens while lusting after his nephew Edwin Drood’s fiancee Rosa Bud, one of his choristers. Edwin is found to be missing one morning, with only a shirt-pin, and “a gold watch, bearing engraved upon its back ED”, ever found. The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved, as the novel was left incomplete at the time of Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870, with its ending unknown.
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