Who Killed Edwin Drood?

We all like to see a good villain brought to justice, but when the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 left his final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, his fans took the idea literally by putting the villain on trial. Ever since Dickens's death there has been no shortage of suggestions as to how his last story might end, in the form of books, articles, plays, films and even musicals. The Charles Dickens Museum in London has an extensive archive containing the vast majority of these. Of all the responses preserved in their collections, one of the strangest is the public trial of the book's antagonist John Jasper, conducted at King's Hall in Covent Garden by the Dickens Fellowship on the evening of January 7, 1914.While the book's characters were played by actors, the legal roles were filled by several Dickensians and authors. The involvement…