It’s infuriating that of all the works he could have left unfinished, Dickens managed to die in the middle of a murder mystery.

Gerard O’Donovan reviews the concluding part of the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s unfinished Gothic novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Only its author, Charles Dickens, knew how the story was meant to end and his death in 1870 put paid to any hopes of readers ever knowing for certain what its outcome was supposed to be.

Now, a major new BBC adaptation of Dickens’s final work attempts to solve the unsolvable.

You don’t have to like Dickens. Literature is a house with many mansions. But if Dickens gets up your nose, as he clearly gets up the BBC’s, the question has to be asked why you simply don’t leave him alone.

The Mystery Of Edwin Drood is a Charles Dickens story about a choirmaster’s obsession with a beautiful young woman. But a different kind of obsession has developed since Dickens last put pen to paper on the novel 142 years ago: How should the story end?

Charles Dickens died before he could finish his last novel. So crime-writer Gwyneth Hughes set out to complete it for a new BBC version – and soon wished she hadn’t

For many he is the finest British author, but the BBC has altered some of Charles Dickens’s greatest work for a season celebrating the bicentenary of his birth.

As Jedrington Secret-Past he fronts the BBC’s big Christmas costume comedy, The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, a freewheeling spoof of all things Dickens, based by writer Mark Evans on his Radio 4 series Bleak Expectations.