It’s bugging me and the question is vague enough Google laughs at me. I recall some sort of “pool” or “game” that gets mentioned in popular media on the odd occasion about a bunch of (usually wealthy) people (usually “gentlemen”) essentially pooling a bunch of money, and then the last one alive gets to collect it. Sometimes the plot involves betrayal, murder, etc, and sometimes it’s just sort of a wistful bit of backstory. I’ve heard it’s a real life practice too.
The thing is, I swear there’s a name for this practice, but it escapes me. Does anyone know?
More commonly, a tontine was a form of retirement insurance. At a time when a long life was as much feared as an early death, such insurance made sense. We all pool our money and each member get a portion of the interest on the capital. As we die off, fewer of us share the interest. At last one is left, he takes the whole pot.
The most famous tontine was imposed by the French revolutionary government. The difference was that at the end the last guy only got a lot of interest, not the principle. That is to say the government borrowed the money, paid the interest but not the capital. Pretty darn sneaky.
The mystery writer Ellery Queen loved tontines and probably wrote a dozen stories about them starting in the 1930s. Most of them required him to deduce which of two people who seemed to die at the same time was truly last.
I didn’t realize that the tontine paid out interest. Based on what I learned from The Simpsons (and everything I know, I learned from The Simpsons), I thought it was winner-take-all. That doesn’t benefit any of the members who died earlier.
That is why a tontine is such a huge amount of money. Each family of course names its youngest, healthiest son or daughter as the tontine shareholder in the hope he will live a long, long time. Some tontines (like in the movies) retain all interest for close to a century before one marvelous payout.
Tontines administered by insurance companies (ISTR Garfield had one) paid out the interest annually in a bunch of little payments that grew each year. Sort of like a pension.
If the final winner gets the principle AND the annual payments, he is a double winner.
I’ve always heard of them in the context of a unit of veterans from some war or another, with the prize being more symbolic than actually valuable (a bottle of some really good potent potable, say). I saw a short story once where a con-man manages to convince a mark that the members of a particular tontine have become immortal due to some sort of diabolical interference, and gets him to pay an exorbitant amount of money to join it through some loophole.
Why would the mark want to join a tontine with immortal members? Wouldn’t that be a guaranteed loss for him? Or is the deal that the mark would gain immortality by joining to tontine?
I believe I just read this story not too long ago, and it’s driving me nuts trying to remember where! Part of the con had to do with the con guy buying lunch for a bunch of geezers from the local old folks’ (or veterans’) home, and passing them off to his mark (from a distance) as being much older than they were. I think he told the mark that one of them had fought in the Spanish-American War.
I’ve recently been reading from a couple of short story collections, but I’m not finding this story in them.
Never mind, I can sleep tonight now! It’s “The Magnum,” by Jack Ritchie. And it was in one of my anthologies, 100 Malicious Little Mysteries, published by Barnes & Noble Books.