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Kate Dickens tells the story of her father’s final and unfinished novel, a fast-moving thriller set in the cathedral town of Cloisterham. It is Christmas and all is fine until Edwin - the young man who appears to have it all, a beautiful and charming prospective bride, the promise of an engineering job in Egypt - disappears. Presumed murdered. Could it have been impetuous Neville Landless? Or Edwin’s uncle Jasper?

This episode sees Princess Puffer overhear Jasper talking in an opium daze, and turns up in Cloisterham to spy on him, where she falls into a trap.

Dickens’ last, unfinished, novel is set in a phantasmagorical drug-fuelled landscape where nobody is who or what they say they are. Whilst writing it, Dickens was driving himself towards exhaustion and death through obsessive public performances of the most lurid parts of Oliver Twist - revisiting his first successful novel whilst struggling with his last, fearful that his creative well is drying up and that this story would never be brought to a close.

Mike Walker’s dramatisation is narrated by Dickens’ daughter Kate, witness to her father’s final weeks, and whose fascination with this story leads her to look into its unsolved conclusion to find clues about her father’s character.

Kate Dickens .….. Pippa Nixon
John Jasper ...… Joel McCormack
Edwin Drood ..…. Iwan Davies
Rosa Bud ...… Isabella Inchbald
Neville Landless …... Maanuv Thiara
Helena Landless .….. Halema Hussain
Reverend Crisparkle ...… Damian Lynch
Princess Puffer ...… Rachel Atkins
Station Master ...… Wilf Scolding

Written by Charles Dickens

Adapted by Mike Walker

Directed by Jeremy Mortimer

A Â鶹ԼÅÄ Cymru Wales Production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4, first broadcast in December 2020.