THE LAST DICKENS

Matthew Pearl (Vintage, £7.99)

Charles Dickens died before finishing his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and over the years there have been countless attempts to re-create the end of the story.

US author Pearl has taken a different approach, beginning his tale in Boston, where publishers Fields and Osgood anxiously await the arrival from England of the latest instalment. This is the cue for a few publishing industry jokes, as the cut-throat competition hots up.

When the messenger carrying the manuscript is killed, young James Osgood sets out for England to solve the mystery, accompanied by his assistant Rebecca, the firm's bookkeeper, a lovely young divorcee.

At Dickens’s house in Kent, Gad’s Hill, they meet not only the writer’s family but also some of the villagers who inspired the Dickens characters, including Edwin Drood.

Soon they are being pursued and shanghaied through Dickens haunts by what appear to be some of the author’s own characters. We meet the opium addicts, mesmerists and the poverty of Victorian London, as portrayed in Dickens’s novels.

There is a slightly confusing sub-plot involving Dickens’s son Frank, a superintendent in the Bengal Mounted Police. Two of the younger Dickens’s subordinates are tracking an opium thief and it soon becomes clear how the two stories intertwine.

It all builds to a melodramatic climax worthy of the classic author himself, although our patience starts to wear thin as the villain, having trapped his victims, insists on explaining himself at great length to his pursuers.

It’s rollicking entertainment, with pistols, thundering carriages, a pretty heroine and the truth revealed at last.