Left penniless by the death of his improvident father, young Nicholas Nickleby assumes responsibility for his mother and sister and seeks help from his Scrooge-like Uncle Ralph. Instantly disliking Nicholas, Ralph sends him to teach in a school run by the stupidly sadistic Wackford Squeers. Nicholas decides to escape, taking with him the orphan Smike, one of Squeers’s most abused young charges, and the two embark on a series of adventurous encounters with an array of humanity’s worst and best—greedy fools, corrupt lechers, cheery innocents, and selfless benefactors.

The first genuine mystery novel written by Dickens was never finished and was published posthumously in 1870 leaving the mystery unsolved forever. The choirmaster of Cloisterham, Jack Jasper, has a ward named Edwin Drood, a respectable young man engaged to Rosa Bud. Underneath the respectability Drood is an opium addict and no longer loves Rosa, the secret love of Jasper. Drood breaks the engagement and disappears completely. Also in love with Rosa, Neville Landless is arrested for Drood's murder, but released for lack of a body. Fearing Rosa's feelings for Landless, Jasper confesses his love and threatens to further implicate Landless in the murder unless she returns his love. The manuscript ends as Datchery, a shadowy character bedeviling Jasper, is introduced. Speculation abounds, but the mystery remains.

The Pickwick Papers was Charles Dickens’s first and personal favourite novel. It was serialised under the title “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” between April 1836 and November 1837 when its author was only in his mid-twenties. Unlike some of his later works it is extremely episodic and comic. It always shows its origins in a periodical with its cliff-hangers and the way Dickens changes the story and various characters’ position in the novel as it grows and according to their popularity (such the Wellers).Mr Samuel Pickwick is the founder and chairman of the absurd Pickwick Club which consists of Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle who go through various amusing and often quite ridiculous adventures that are scantily interconnected and never amount to a complex sequence of events until perhaps Pickwick’s disastrous misunderstanding with Mrs Bardell.

A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives.