The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a novel on which Charles Dickens was working at the time of his death. In Cardiff on Christmas Eve 1869, Dickens told the Ninth Doctor and Rose that it "lacked an ending". Inspired by their adventure with the Gelth, Dickens decided to incorporate the aliens into the story in order to spread the word about the existence of alien life, proposing to make the killer in the book not a boy's uncle but something "not of this Earth". He further hinted that he might change the title to The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Blue Element. He dies the next year, (TV: The Unquiet Dead) while in the middle of writing a sentence in the novel. (PROSE: The Book of the War) It remained unfinished. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)
In 1936, James Whale began directing a film adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood commissioned by Faction Hollywood. With Michael Brookhaven as the film's consulting producer, Faction Hollywood used the film's stage as a physical embodiment of Production Hell to imprison actors, producers, and other movie industry individuals. The story featured a character named "Rosa" and a tomb-searching church warden named "Durdles": Bette Davis was briefly cast as Rosa in 1938, and even decades later, the name "Durdles" would scare any character actor old enough to remember the production. James Whale left a copy of the novel by his bedside when he committed suicide in 1957. Three endings were known to have been recorded, but with the middle parts left unfinished, the film continued its Production Hell into the early 21st century. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Behind the Scenes[]
- The 1965 BBC Radio 4 adaptation for "Saturday Night Theatre" starred Francis De Wolff as the Narrator and Malcolm Terris as Edwin Drood.
- The 1990 BBC Radio 4 adaptation for Classic Serial featured Gareth Thomas as Crisparkle, Michael Cochrane as Tartar and Timothy Bateson as Sapsea.
- The 1993 film starred Robert Powell as John Jasper, Glyn Houston as Grewgious, Andrew Sachs as Durdles and Ronald Fraser as Dean.
- The 2012 miniseries featured Julia McKenzie as Mrs Crisparkle, Ron Cook as Durdles, Sacha Dhawan as Neville Landless and Ian McNeice as Mayor Thomas Sapsea.
- Peter Davison played Mr. Grewgious in BBC Radio 4 adaptation that ran from 2020 to 2021.
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