5 Novels Authors Didn’t Finish Because They Inconveniently Died

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens died in June 1870, and at the time he was working on this, the prototypical Dickensian novel, one fraught with forbidden love, love triangles, and 19th century Victorian misery. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is really about Drood’s uncle, John Jasper, a choirmaster in love with a student, who happens to be Drood’s fiancée. And then the titular mystery of Edwin Drood comes into play when Edwin Drood mysteriously disappears. Dickens died before he could tell us what happened. The plan, as was usually the case with Dickens’s novels, was to release The Mystery of Edwin Drood in installments—12 over the course of 12 months at a cost of a shilling each. Only six were published before the author’s death. While Dickens’ death was cause for international mourning, it was also quite maddening that he left a book—a mystery, at that—unresolved. Many writers have stepped up and published their own back ends of Edwin Drood. Among the kookiest was one by Thomas James in 1873. This Vermont printmaster took the idea of ghostwriting very literally: He claimed that his mind and pen were merely a conduit through which the spirit of Dickens wrote.

Poodle Springs
Raymond Chandler wrote seven Philip Marlowe detective novels, classic crime stories that provided us with most of the tropes we associate with the genre. He planned to write, at the very least, an eighth one, which had the working title of The Poodle Springs Story. Perhaps he’d have come up with a better name, if he hadn’t died in 1959. At first, the remnants were included in a postmortem collection of Chandler ephemera called Raymond Chandler Speaking, first published in 1962. It wasn’t until 1988 that Chandler’s estate explored the possibility of having someone finish this last great work and determine what could have been. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Chandler’s birth, representatives of Chandler’s estate asked Robert B. Parker to finish it. He was a solid choice: He was as dominant a crime fiction creator as Chandler, creating the TV series Spenser: For Hire and the Jesse Stone book series. As for Parker’s contributions to Poodle Springs, the replacement author wrote more than 300 pages, so it’s much more his work than it is Chandler’s.

Hornblower During the Crisis
The 19th and early 20th centuries were lousy with adventure novels set on the high seas. Most characters and books and this genre have been thrown overboard by the waves of history, but Horatio Hornblower remains well known. C.S. Forester got the series going in 1937 with Beat to Quarters, the first of a dozen or so Hornblower tales he’d publish. It all came to an end in 1967, when Forester died after just barely starting a new Hornblower adventure called Hornblower and the Crisis. A crisis indeed: Forester had written just 158 pages and a short outline of what was supposed to happen next. That outline was included in the first editions of Hornblower and the Crisis.

The Last Tycoon
F. Scott Fitzgerald earned a place in literary history with his devastating Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby, the Great American Novel. While he wrote dozens of short stories, for which he earned the bulk of his income and praise during his lifetime, Fitzgerald published just four complete novels. The fifth: The Love of the Last Tycoon, or simply The Last Tycoon. After Fitzgerald succumbed to the effects of lifelong alcoholism in 1940, his friend, editor, and champion Edmund Wilson took it upon himself to get it into publishing shape. Wilson had his work cut out for him. Fitzgerald was broke and his life was in complete disarray at the time of his death, and what material he had left behind was very rough. That left Wilson to fill in the blanks, which he could do relatively easily, as The Last Tycoon was a thinly veiled autobiography about Fitzgerald’s ill-fated period working as Hollywood screenwriter.

Micro
Going to medical school and becoming a doctor is generally something that one would “fall back on” if a career in the arts or letters doesn’t work out. Michael Crichton did it backwards—he left behind his career as a doctor to be an author. But he sure made it count. He sold an estimated 200 million books, and he virtually invented a new genre of fiction: the techno-thriller. These tales of advanced technology run amok—Jurassic Park, Congo, Airframe, and tons more you’ve read on a plane—tapped into a very common paranoia in the late 20th century. Crichton was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2008 and died later that year. A prolific writer to the end, Crichton’s relatives and associates discovered that he quite a few unfinished novels behind on his computer. At the time of his death, he had only halfway completed a two-book deal with HarperCollins, which decided to pick up the most complete of those incomplete works: another technologically-themed science-fiction mystery called Micro. It involves a bunch of dead executives, an almost microscopic robot, and the exploitation of a forest for pharmaceutical ingredients. While Crichton had announced that he was working on the book, he had only gotten about a third of the way through the manuscript. To finish it, HarperCollins recruited a pretty solid choice: writer Richard Preston, author of the bestselling nonfiction Ebola overview The Hot Zone (as well as a number of thankfully fictional techno-thrillers). Micro was a bestseller when it was finally released in 2011.
Did we miss any novels that were left unfinished when their authors shuffled off this mortal coil?