A Beautiful Enigma - Rated 
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is probably the most famous unfinished novel in the English language. Dickens's death almost exactly half-way through the writing of the book leaves the disappearance, and probable murder, of Edwin Drood unexplained. It also means we never discover what happens to the lovely Rosa Bud; the fiery Neville Landless; the superficially bumbling Mr Grewgious (who is a whole lot sharper than he seems); the refreshingly blunt stonemason Durdles and the probable villain of the piece John Jasper - choirmaster by day and opium addict by night. The charcters all hang in suspended animation, their fates forever undecided, and it's very much to our loss that Dickens didn't live to untangle their respective destinies.
Drood is similar in many respects to much of Dickens's earlier fiction. The tale was clearly intended to be on a smaller scale than many of the late great novels that immediately preceeded it (Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend) and it was tightly focused around the stories of a very few characters, rather than a cast of hundreds. With Drood Dickens was, I think, attempting to show how a murderer, or someone who believes himself to be a murderer, will ultimately always give himself away no matter how clever he believes he has been. Dickens is not, for once, looking outwards to the ills and injustices of society, but is rather gazing inwards at an individual and the workings of the human mind under extreme conditions. It was a rather bold step for a writer known for his broad canvases to suddenly reduce his cast of actors to a mere handful and it shows that Dickens was trying new ideas right up until the very end.
Like everyone who has been haunted by the novel I wish the great man had lived to finish it. What we are left with is a beautiful, sometimes sinister but always fascinating enigma. Drood contains some of Dickens's most dazzling descriptive writing: Cloisterham hushed on Christmas Eve, for example, or the stunning scene in which Jasper reveals his passionate, obsessive love for Rosa, who sits in terrified imobility trembling at his every word. It may be possible to argue that some of Dickens's sheer energy had been dimmed by age, but his great descriptive gifts were with him right up to the very end.
In spite of its unfinished state Drood is well worth reading. It's somehow like a ghost story in which the ghost is always just off-stage, and its open-endedness leaves any number of alternative events equally possible and equally unknowable. It's the most beautifully enigmatic 'ending' a mystery novel could possibly have.
MED Shows promise; also interesting collection of shorter stories in my edition - Rated
Dickens's last, half finished novel. This is reasonably fast paced compared to some of the author's works. It is a great shame he died before this could be completed as the elements of a good mystery are there and it leaves off at what feels like the threshold of a fairly significant revelation. As ever, some colourful characters and great language. But why is it written in the present tense?
Also a mixed and interesting collection of shorter stories in my Wordsworth edition:
Master Humphrey's Clock - engaging and heart warming for the most part, though I found the Weller parts tiresome because of the vernacular of their speech.
Hunted Down - an interesting little mystery with several twists.
Holiday Romance - a very amusing story told by four children, showing their view of the world and of adults.
George Silverman's Explanation - a story of a man shaped by the influences of the grinding poverty of his childhood and his adolescent experiences of religious poverty. Becomes a bit less hard-edged as it goes on into his life as a tutor, though.
Dickens's unfinished novel continues to intrigue. - Rated
Set in Cloisterham, a cathedral town, Dickens's final novel, unfinished, introduces two elements unusual for Dickens--opium-eating and the church. In the opening scene, John Jasper, music teacher and soloist in the cathedral choir, awakens from an opium trance in a flat with two other semi-conscious men and their supplier, an old woman named Puffer, and then hurries off to daily vespers. Jasper, aged twenty-six, is the uncle and guardian of Edwin Drood, only a few years younger. Drood has been the fiancé of Rosa Bud for most of his life, an arrangement made by his and Rosa's deceased fathers to honor their friendship, and the wedding is expected within the year. Jasper, Rosa's music teacher, is secretly in love with her, though she finds him repellent. When two orphans, Helena and Neville Landless, arrive in Cloisterham, Helena and Rosa become friends, and Neville finds himself strongly attracted to the lovely Rosa. Ultimately, the hot-tempered Neville and Drood have a terrible argument in which Neville threatens Drood before leaving town on a walking trip. Drood vanishes the same day. Apprehended on his trip, Neville is questioned about Drood's disappearance, and Jasper accuses him of murder. Tightly organized to this point, the novel shows Jasper himself to be a prime suspect, someone who could have engineered the evidence against Neville, but Dickens unexpectedly introduces some new characters at this point--the mysterious Dick Datchery and Tartar, an old friend of Rev. Mr. Crisparkle, minor canon at the cathedral. Puffer, the opium woman, is reintroduced and appears set to play a greater role, since she solicits information from the semi-conscious Jasper and secretly follows him. This is the halfway point in the projected novel, and Dickens clearly planned to develop these new (or reintroduced) characters to deepen the mystery. More modern in many ways than his previous novels, the characters here are not simple stereotypes--some are good people who have real flaws and make mistakes. Dickens's tying of Jasper to the church choir, where he was a soloist, suggests some examination of the theme of hypocrisy, in which the good Mr. Crisparkle would be Jasper's antithesis. The opium scenes, vividly drawn, carry the unusual suggestion that opium leads to a kind of intoxication similar to that of alcohol, and Dicken does not use these scenes to offer dire warnings about the drug--at least at this point. Especially intriguing because it is unfinished, this novel continues to fascinate mystery lovers and literary scholars more than a century after its first publication. Mary Whipple
An unfinished novel and other miscellany - Rated 
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is exactly half a novel, the first six of twelve planned instalments, Dickens dying before the second six were completed. It shares with Dickens's final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, a plot based around a marriage arranged in the wills of dead parents; one of the couple goes missing, the eponymous Drood, and is presumed dead. His young opium-addicted uncle, seemingly obsessed with Drood's fiancée, Rosa Budd, appears to be the prime suspect.
Edwin Drood was going to be a much shorter and leaner novel than its predecessor, with no subplots and fewer characters. The writing, too, is a little sparer than in earlier Dickens. However, the predilection for comic character names is continued - the best example being the bombastic philanthropist Mr. Honeythunder, who does indeed appear to shout and bully much of the time.
Is this half a novel, a mystery which is never resolved, worth reading? Yes, because it is entertaining throughout and shows that Dickens still had the potential to develop further as a writer. Much like Schubert's eighth unfinished Symphony, it is all the more enigmatic as an incomplete masterwork. Moreover, it exercises the imagination as the reader has to complete the story him- or herself, a quite deliberate literary device sometimes encountered in modern novels.
Also in this bargain edition is Master Humphrey's Clock, originally written to introduce The Old Curiousty Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Indeed, the mysterious narrator at the beginning of the former novel is none other than Master Humphrey telling the story to his group of friends, a club of elderly gentlemen meet to tell each other stories; and here later, Mr Pickwick joins this group, allowing Dickens to also involve the Wellers from The Pickwick Papers.
Two short stories, Hunted Down and George Silverman's Explanation, from 1859 and 1868 respectively, are included. The former is somewhat reminiscent of Wilkie Collins (a close friend of Dickens), the latter is an unusual portrait of misplaced guilt and humility. Finally, A Holiday Romance is four short interconnected fables written from the point of view of four children, friends relating their adventures. These three short pieces show the diversity and flexibility of Dickens's writing, and are so unlike most of his novels in style.
what might have been. - Rated
It's impossible to forget when reading this that it is only half the size of what it should have been. Dickens died almost exactly halfway through finishing it, and it is easy to see that if he had lived it would have ranked as one of his truly great novels. There is also no denying that Dickens comes across as somewhat jaundiced with human nature in the closing months of his life. He has very little to say that is positive about the cathedral city of Cloisterham, and his anger at the hypocrisy and double-standards of the life there practically leaps off the page at you. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his creation of John Jasper, one of his darkest characters. Jasper is the leading memeber of the Cloisterham choir, but in his spare time he is an opium-addict who haunts the sleaziest dens in the pursuit of his fix. Not only that but he terrifies young Rosa Budd with his designs on her, and plots to do away with his nephew, the Edwin Drood of the title, in the most dastardly and cunning way .... or does he? The fact that "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" is unfinished leaves that question hanging resolutely in mid-air. We come away from the book none the wiser not only as to whether Edwin has been murdered by his wicked uncle, but even whether he really is alive or dead. It is the mystery of literature that has tantalised readers ever since Dickens wrote it in 1870. There are many reasons to bemoan the fact that the book was never finished, not only the obvious chief one that Dickens died, but that the book clearly had the makings of a first-rate murder mystery. Take for example the scene where Edwin goes to get his watch fixed at the jewellers, this was clearly meant to be important evidence at a later date, as is Jasper so clearly making a big issue out of his fake diary entries, but of course, it was never to be. Plus also we are introduced to a whole host of memorable characters (Billickins the landlady was a role made for Irene Handl!) who never got the chance to breathe as much as they should. None of this should stop you enjoying the book. Raymond Chandler is quoted in the Introduction as saying that the measure of a good mystery is that you want to read it even knowing that the end is missing. You really can't put it any better than that.
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