Author behind puzzle books on James Herriot and Yorkshire creates new work on Charles Dickens

Leeds-born Morgan has recently published a collection of 100 puzzles based on the life and major works of Charles Dickens.

"I have been reading Dickens for years and I realised I was getting to the end point of reading all the major novels,” he says. “I began to think I could do something with that.

"When I finally finished the Mystery of Edwin Drood, I thought I’m fired up and ready. It was a serious project because it draws on 15 major books plus the novella A Christmas Carol so it was a big piece of work.”

Morgan, who lives near Malton in North Yorkshire, is no stranger to creating puzzles, something that originally grew from him experimenting with computer software back in the 1980s.

A master’s degree in educational computing followed and that paved the way to both the development of his own classics teaching course and the publication of a series of puzzle books. His latest includes crosswords, word searches, anagrams, cryptic challenges and sudokus.

"From Samuel Pickwick to Edwin Drood, taking in Oliver Twist, Eboneezer Scrooge and David Copperfield along the way, there should be something for all fans of Dickens, surely the greatest novelist in the English language,” he says.

"I’d like to think that even a child who’s maybe just seen a couple of things on television would be able to do the word searches and some of the easy puzzles. But some of the difficult stuff in the book, you have to be quite knowledgeable to do and it’s deliberately written like that.”

Copies of the new book are already on sale at the Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent, which is housed in the cottage that was Dickens’ inspiration for the home of Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield.

They can also be purchased at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, Dickens’ London home from 1837-1839. "That’s the house where he wrote Oliver Twist so that’s really exciting,” Morgan says.

With the Dickens puzzles now completed, he’s already eyeing up his next literary-based project.

"Most people who know me know it would have to be Shakespeare. It was important to me with Dickens that I read all of the books, studied them all, got the data out before I started on the project and to do that with Shakespeare means an awful lot of reading so it’s not going to be imminent. But I think Shakespeare is next.”

Charles Dickens Puzzles by Julian Morgan is out now.