The publication of the first instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood appeared in Dickens’s weekly “All Year Round” in April 1870. It arosed wide attention from the audience for the author’s latest work “which promised to be one of his most effective and popular books (Morford 5).” At the time Dickens was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the police force established in 1829 did not work exclusively on prevention of crime any more, it focused on detection too; the daily press was abounding in the news about theft, assaults and murders. Crime became a form of entertainment; real cases were made into plays and performed. Wilkie Collins had already published The Moonstone, probably the first detective novel written by an English author. The…show more content… The Mystery of Edwin Drood was his attempt to write an atypical, abnormal novel of his time, in which the known genres dissolved and in the same time merged together. The influence of many different genres is evident but none of them prevails. The confusion and ambiguity of the novel’s genre reflect the confusion and ambiguity of the society. “This narrative strategy implies that, for him, the rules and norms of Victorian literary tradition were destined to decompose in a world that was losing its moral, religious and cultural reference points…show more content… Unfortunately, Dickens was so secretive about his intentions for the future instalments that he never revealed or wrote down any of them. There was nothing whatsoever that would suggest the way the story was to unfold. Curious enough, many people have heard about The Mystery of Edwin Drood due to the recent TV adaptation by the BBC which aired in 2012. But the lack of popularity of the text itself does not mean that the audience is not interested in the story. Theatrical adaptation of the novel has seen 608 performances at the Broadway theatre from 1985 to 1987 (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”IBDB.com) which was revived again in 2012, the same year Aria Entertainment produced a London revival which had 35 performances that year ("The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Aria Entertainment)