The BBC’s latest Dickens offering is more adventurous a choice than its Christmas treat, Great Expectations, which has been filmed more times than you’ve had turkey dinners.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (BBC Two) is famous for being unfinished, and over the years has proved more popular with theatre companies than with film-makers.

The 1980s Broadway musical production ended with audiences asked to vote on the murderer’s identity, but there are no such viewer-participation shenanigans for BBC Two’s new two-part adaptation; Gwyneth Hughes (whose CV includes directing Manhunt: the Search for the Yorkshire Ripper and writing the teleplay for the missing mother mini-series Five Days) was brought on board to follow the likes of Wilkie Collins and GK Chesterton in providing her own ending.

Dickens got about halfway through the story before he died, and what he left is unsettling to readers who, like me, are only familiar with his more famous novels, with its unconventional use of the present tense giving it the feel of a film.

This adaptation plunged straight in with a disorientating glimpse into the mind of choirmaster John Jasper (Matthew Rhys), who was a whole lot darker than your average Dickens protagonist, almost an anti-hero.

Given that we saw Jasper throttling his ward, the eponymous Drood, with his necktie right off the bat – even if it was only an opium dream – you did start to wonder whether the “mystery” part of the story would pass muster with modern audiences attuned to Agatha Christie’s reversals and the pretzel plotting of Hollywood thrillers.

We presently found out that Jasper harboured an unhealthy stalker-like fixation on Drood’s fiancée; when he started manhandling urchins in the graveyard as well, it looked like a done deal.

But wait! Surely that’s too obvious? There were plenty of other suspects in the quaint cathedral town of Cloisterham, reportedly modelled on Rochester but not quite as vividly realised in our imaginations as Dickensian London.

How about Rory Kinnear as lovable Reverend Crisparkle, or Alun Armstrong (veteran of many a Dickens adaptation) as kindly lawyer Hiram Grewgious? Both of them seemed too good to be true, but could they be concealing sinister secrets behind those amiable exteriors?

Personally, I had my own suspicions about Ron Cook as the stonemason Durdle – too simple-minded by half, and with a fishy habit of referring to himself in the third person.

Perhaps the culprit would turn out to be the unfeasibly innocent-looking Rosa Bud (Tamzin Merchant), who made half of a small but perfectly formed couple with her betrothed Drood (Freddie Fox)?

And young Edwin himself was precisely the sort of privileged brat most of us want to slap. I actually felt like throttling him myself. So no shortage of suspects there. Maybe it was like Murder on the Orient Express and everyone clubbed together.

But sadly no, the climax of this intriguing and intermittently thrilling episode left us in no doubt who the murderer was, which at this stage certainly felt like a disappointment.

So unless the second part reveals that it has all been another of Jasper’s opium dreams, we’re left with a Columbo-type situation; less a whodunit than a will-the-murderer-get-away-with-it.

All the same, I was absorbed from the start by this dark little gothic tale. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is only the latest demonstration that Dickens and telly go together like custard and jelly. — Anne Billson for The Telegraph

The weight of expectation on this two-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s last work was always going to be on the second half, given that the author left his novel only half written – and with no real indication of how he saw it continuing – at the time of his death in 1870.

The opening part stayed pretty much true to the half Dickens did complete – setting up protagonist John Jasper (Matthew Rhys) as a Gothically nasty piece of work – an opium addict sick in mind and body, a stalker given to dark, erotically charged fantasies about murdering his young ward Edwin Drood (Freddie Fox) because of his engagement to the object of Jasper’s sick fantasies, the virginal Rosa Bud (Tamzin Merchant). The only surprise in the first episode, then, was the cliffhanger in which Jasper appeared to do the dirty deed and throttle Drood, exultantly, with his silky black neckerchief.

The question of whether he had done so in reality was one that occupied the whole of the second part – cleverly pieced together by scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes, who bravely took on the job of giving the mystery a satisfying conclusion. Jasper certainly acted like a guilty man – so angst-ridden by now he virtually pulsed with it – attempting to push suspicion upon vulnerable Neville Landless (Sacha Dhawan), and embarking on a terrifying campaign to seduce the grieving Rosa by any means, the more psychologically cruel the better, it seemed.

But the fact that Drood’s body, although missing, had never been found, hung like an enormous finger pointing down from heaven over everything. Sure enough, despite the creepy air of seeming inevitability, and the discovery of a body mouldering away in the cathedral crypt, it came as no great surprise when young Drood sauntered in five minutes from the end – blithely pointing out that he’d been away on a trip to Egypt, and that actually Jasper was really the victim in all this because his father (also Drood’s as it turned out) had never loved him.

Which isn’t to say that this wasn’t an absorbing, atmospheric, lovingly acted and cleverly teased out piece of work. It was all of those things and more. But despite ingeniously tying up a multitude of Dickens’s loose ends, and remaining remarkably true to the characters (all credit to Hughes for that) overall it failed to hit the mark at an emotional level – the ending being perhaps just a little too clever, too perfect, and too forgiving of one of Dickens’s nastiest creations. — Gerard O'Donovan for The Telegraph