The allusion in the subtitle refers to "the curious incident" in "Silver Blaze," as A. J. Pointon, playing Sherlock Holmes, ponders a mystery akin to one confronting the great detective. Why didn't the dog bark in the night when a famous racehorse disappeared? Answer that question and you have a vital clue to the crime. However, to reveal who failed to ask what in this latest attempt to crack the novel's unsolved central mystery will make the reviewer a spoilsport. Instead, I agree to abide by three pledges the author asks of readers. First, not to cheat and turn to the end to identify "the Villain." Second, to follow the arguments and evidence and consent not "to spread the story abroad" and thwart the enjoyment for others. Finally, I will refrain from feeling "disgruntled" about a "solution" that threatens the thriving "Drood Industry" rather than the novel's hero (2–3). Taking these pledges, I will protect the secrets, enter the spirit of the game, and follow Mr. Jaggers's advice to Pip. "Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule" (Great Expectations ch. 40).

Pointon lays out his cards at the beginning, though not without some legerdemain. Quick to affirm that Dickens aimed "for a brilliant novel," Pointon dismisses verdicts delivered by Wilkie Collins ("Dickens's last laboured effort") and George Bernard Shaw ("a gesture by a man three-quarters dead"), only to insist on a work iron-bound to a single genre. Edwin Drood, he contends, is "a tightly written detective story," one Dickens undertook "to outshine the mystery stories that had gone before" (5–6). Obliged to supply false leads, more than one suspect, and "a truly surprising surprise ending," the novelist is granted little room for poetic language, ambiguity, and the complexity of motive characteristic of Dickens's mature fiction. Instead the text is relentlessly scoured for "hard evidence" from which a case can be constructed. "It is not for nothing that, in a court of law, 'hearsay evidence' is not acceptable," Pointon writes (25). Citing a legal precedent as one that should apply to a detective story, testimony from several informants is ruled out.

Pointon is particularly severe with information from Dickens's closest friend and confidante. Was John Forster confused or guilty of collusion, Pointon asks, when he wrote the chapter "Last Book" in The Life of Charles Dickens, (bk. 11, ch. 2)? In answer to his own question Pointon is firm. Commentators on the novel need to realize that "the evidence fairly shows Forster had fabricated a plot for the story of Edwin Drood pretending to base it on two 'Dickens' letters which had to be highly suspect, and it was a plot which in no way could be fitted to the other information left to us by Dickens himself" (48).

By contrast, the cover design for the monthly installments proves admissible; ditto, with caveats, Dickens's working notes for the unfinished novel. Deposition from Katey Dickens is also allowed, specifically her statement in June 1906, which many cite who see more in Drood than camouflage and "diversionary information." "It was not […] for the intricate working of the plot alone, that my father cared to write this story," Katey wrote. More important, she thought, was her father's "wonderful observation of character, and his strange insights into the tragic secrets of the human heart." That observation published in the Pall Mall Magazine, Pointon concedes, "may have been right, but, as we shall see, it is not certain she realised whose hearts were involved" (6). [...] — David Paroissien for Dickens Quarterly