The politest form of the question is also the hardest to answer. If the original is good, why not read the original? It deserves a straight reply, and I agree with its premise more than the question expects. Every book in the series says on its copyright page which novel it reimagines and where that novel can be read for nothing. The originals are in the public domain. Anyone who would rather have Wilde than a retelling of Wilde is one click away from him, and the book that sent them there has done something useful.
So the question is fair, and it has a real edge. The first six books retell Oscar Wilde, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry James, Alexandre Dumas and Oliver Goldsmith, each as a thriller set in the present, and a reader who loves those novels is entitled to ask what could justify putting a hand on them. A retelling that cannot answer is a cover version, and the world has enough of those.
The answer I started with was the weak one: the answer most people assume. The originals are hard going for a modern reader in ways that have nothing to do with their quality. The pacing belongs to an evening in 1868, and a reader on a train home has a different evening. The settings need footnotes. And the great twists have been imitated for so long that they no longer turn: every reader of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde knows the secret before opening it, because the title has become a phrase. Fix those three things, the argument goes, and the old book becomes readable again.
That argument picks a fight the original wins. A retelling justified only by pace is the source with the slow parts removed, and it competes with its own source on the source's ground. Wilde's book has Wilde's sentences in it. Mine cannot. A book of that kind is a convenience, and a convenience is too small a thing to build a book on, let alone six books.
The repairs stayed in the books all the same. Every one of them moves faster than its source, is set now, and has a twist the reader has not met before. Those are the conditions a modern thriller must meet, and a retelling that failed any of them would lose its reader in the first chapter and deserve to. Meeting them justifies nothing.
The real answer is that the world has changed so much that the same question now means something different.
Each of these novels asked a question, and none of those questions has gone out of date. The answers have, because the world they were written for no longer exists, and in the world that replaced it the same question asks something its author could not have meant. A retelling answers the question the original asked, in the version it takes in the world we live in now. Three of the six show how far the questions have moved:
In The Picture of Dorian Gray the question is what a man owes his own reflection, and Wilde answers it with a bargain struck over a portrait. The face stays young in public, and the painting in the locked schoolroom carries the truth. Now almost everyone keeps a portrait, and it is the online self, photographed, edited and posted, while the real one lives offline. The concept has turned inside out. The picture is the thing everyone sees and nothing marks, and the damage has moved to the person behind it, where nobody looks.
In The Aspern Papers the question is what the living may take from the dead, and James's plot rests on a fact so ordinary in 1888 that it needed no stating: a life leaves a bundle of letters, and a bundle of letters can be locked in a desk. A life now leaves hundreds of thousands of emails, texts, photographs, location tags, purchases and playlists, held by companies on servers in several countries. Nobody is sure who owns them, who may read them, or whether they can ever be destroyed, and a question about one family's privacy has become a question about everyone's.
In The Count of Monte Cristo the question is how far a wronged man may go. Edmond Dantès is nineteen when he is betrayed and fourteen years older when he escapes from the Château d'If. Dumas wrote decades before anyone described psychological trauma, and his only framework for what the prison did to Dantès is Providence. The science that could name that damage and treat it now exists, and post-traumatic stress has been a clinical diagnosis since 1980. The question becomes what a man does with a wound that could be treated, when the wound is the thing keeping him upright.
In each case the plot is free to change beyond recognition, and should, because the old plot was built to carry the old version of the question. A Venetian palazzo with a desk full of letters in it cannot hold a story about data. That is the practical difference between an update and a retelling. An update asks what the story looks like with phones in it. A retelling asks what the question looks like now and lets the story follow wherever that leads. The plot can go anywhere. The question stays put.
Putting the question first also changes what a retelling keeps. The famous scenes are not always the ones that carry the question, and a retelling that preserves every famous scene out of loyalty ends up with the original's furniture crammed into a smaller house. The scenes that must survive are the ones in which the question is asked aloud or forced on someone. Everything else is negotiable, including a good deal that readers love.
The obvious objection is that if the question is what matters, an original novel could ask it without borrowing anyone's plot. It could, and many do. What it cannot do is show the question moving. A retelling puts two answers side by side, one given in 1844 or 1888 and one given now, and the distance between them is information a reader can get nowhere else: what a century and a half changed, and what it left exactly where it was. Remove the source and the comparison goes with it. That is the test I apply to any retelling, my own included. A book that would survive without its source was never really retelling it.
There is a cynical reading of the whole enterprise, and it deserves an answer too. The classics are out of copyright and come with famous names attached, which makes them cheap raw material with a marketing hook built in. The first half is true. The second is less useful than it sounds, since a reader who picks up a retelling because of the famous name is also the reader most likely to notice whether the book has earned it. The name raises the standard the retelling is judged against, and the only good reason to start there is that the original has asked something a blank page cannot.
None of this makes the originals obsolete, and the retellings are the last books that should want them to be. A retelling works best on a reader who knows the source, because every departure is visible and every departure is an argument. The reader who finishes a modern version and goes back to Dumas or James will find the original better at being itself than anything written since, with its sentences, its length and its century's way of taking its time, and the copyright page is there to send them. What the original cannot do is answer its own question again. The question still stands. The world it was first asked in has gone, and the answer written for that world no longer fits the one we live in. Answering it again is what a retelling is for.
I found out what the project was for while writing the author's note that closes each book. Three of the books were drafted by then. The note had to explain what the series was, and the obvious draft described the books as retelling the classics with modern pacing, settings and themes. I read it back and the last word was wrong. The pacing had changed in every book, and so had every setting and twist. The question each original asked was the one thing none of them had replaced, and it was the reason every one of them existed.