The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The book opens inside an opium den, where a cathedral choirmaster surfaces from a vision of scimitars and white elephants, gropes his way down the broken stairs, and is singing evensong by that same afternoon. That double life is the engine of the last novel Dickens ever began. Respected by every dean and verger in Cloisterham, the choirmaster tells his nephew that the cramped monotony of his existence grinds him away by the grain, and he wants the boy's fiancée badly enough to do something about it. A Christmas storm tears the hands off the cathedral clock; by morning the nephew is gone, and the town turns on the young stranger rather than the uncle. Then the pages stop. Dickens died with half the book unwritten, so the crypt is never opened, the stonemason's quick-lime is never accounted for, and the last sentence he ever set down watches a newcomer sit down cheerfully to his breakfast.