Drood was published by Little, Brown in 2009. The novel takes as its starting point the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865, in which Charles Dickens was a passenger and which traumatized him for the rest of his life. In Simmons’s telling, Dickens encountered a mysterious figure in the wreckage — a cadaverous, Egyptian-featured man called Drood — and became obsessed with finding him again in the underground warrens beneath London.
The narrator is Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend, collaborator, and rival — and one of the great unreliable narrators in recent fiction. Collins is addicted to laudanum (he takes enough to kill most men), jealous of Dickens’s superior talent and fame, sexually conflicted, and increasingly unstable. Whether Drood actually exists, or is a figment of Dickens’s trauma or Collins’s drug-addled paranoia, remains genuinely uncertain throughout the novel’s 900 pages.
The novel is simultaneously a portrait of Victorian literary London, an exploration of the Dickens-Collins friendship and rivalry, a meditation on the relationship between creativity and obsession, and a horror story about mesmerism, underground cults, and the Egyptian god Anubis.
Collecting Drood
First edition (Little, Brown, New York, 2009): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first: $60–$120
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
The Unreliable Narrator
Wilkie Collins is the perfect unreliable narrator: a laudanum addict, a professional rival of Dickens, and a man whose perception of reality deteriorates throughout the novel. The reader can never be certain whether Drood exists, whether Collins is hallucinating, or whether Dickens is manipulating everyone. Simmons uses this ambiguity to explore the nature of literary rivalry, creative jealousy, and the cost of genius.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the Staplehurst railway disaster real? Yes. On June 9, 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a real railway accident at Staplehurst, Kent, in which ten people died. Dickens helped the injured and was deeply traumatised. He never fully recovered and died exactly five years later. Simmons uses this documented event as the novel’s departure point into fiction.