The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

Many successful thrillers rely on placing an ordinary man way out of his depth in some globe-spanning conspiracy, and seeing if he sinks or swims. Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens is no exception; James Osgood is Charles DIckens’ US publisher, who arrives in London to track down a copy of the manuscript for Dickens’ last – and seemingly now unfinished – novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Almost immediately, Osgood is embroiled in a murderous, Opium-tinged conspiracy linking Britain, the US and India. As a thriller, it’s a shame that – in terms of writing – Osgood’s story is overshadowed by both the short ‘flashback’ to Dickens on tour in the US (which offers a genuinely honest portrait of an author entrapped by his own celebrity) and some necessarily mild ‘derring do’ in India, where Dickens’ son serves in the British Army. When an author is described on the cover, by Dan ‘Da Vinci Code’ Brown, as “immensely gifted”, you do worry about another conspiratorial thriller where style comes a poor second to narrative thrust. Competently written and clearly well researched, the main problem here is simply the author’s limited understanding of British idiom which means this novel never entirely convinces. [Paul F Cockburn]