The original novel of The Wrong Box (co-authored by Robert Lewis Stevenson) is even better than the movie. It’s available on Project Gutenberg.. The first chapter gives a nice rundown on how the scheme works.
I remember my mother, back in the 50’s, reading a huge thick historical novel called The Tontine, so that’s how I knew the term. It was written by Thomas B. Costain. I don’t know if it is any good.
Roddy
P.G. Wodehouse has a very funny story revolving around a tontine. Can’t remember which one but I’ll scrounge around for it.
Leo Bloom, that Wodehouse novel is The Butler Did It.
And Malacandra, I saw what you did there. 
I read it, it is about like all of his stuff, written in the stodgy old style. You sort of have to grow up reading the style to enjoy it. I read a fair amount of the stuff I get from Project Gutenberg. Right now I am chewing my way through the works of Thomas Hanshew. It is sort of like reading Sherlock Holmes stylewise. Costain’s Below the Salt was good, as was The Darkness and the Dawn. The Plantagenets is actually done as a non-fiction set of 4 books, somewhat sensationalized and not always accurate.
FWIW, Costain has had a couple of his novels turned into movies, The Black Rose, The Silver Chalice both get shown on AMC/TCM occasionally, the 2 that were serialized I have never seen, they are probably lost unless they got kinetiscoped.
For those who might be wondering if this Wodehouse novel is the source of the phrase, fuhgeddaboudit. It wasn’t published until 1957.
I learned it from the MASH* episode. It was good one with Potter being the ‘winner’ of a bottle that he and some WWI friends had brought home from France.
Came in here to mention this. I knew the concept before, but Archer taught me the name.
Is there any intrinsic mechanical reason why this is so vulnerable to fraud to have so fallen out of favour as an investment?
As a specific investment strategy, this would make a lot of sense for a single person, people seem to obsess on the “all the money when everyone is dead” aspect but ignore the normal dividends.
For a bunch of single people of approximately the same age, this would seem to present a general investment with the prospect of additional yield when you reach old age. If you were worried about murderous co-investors then just have the full amount devolve to charity or split between everyones estate after the last person dies. The prospect of a lottery windfall at age 90 isn’t really the appeal of the scheme.
Surely there aren’t many people who are going to be willing to murder dozens of people for an investment, and it’s not the kind of detail which is going to be overlooked by law enforcement.
Well, it’s essentially an oddly variable annuity with a very small population that doesn’t necessarily adhere to actuarial tables. Plus a lottery.
If you want to be assured of retirement payouts as you get older and have a chunk of money to invest, get an annuity. They’re regulated, predictable, guaranteed by the state if you do it right, and the annuity provider has significantly less incentive to murder you in your sleep. It’s really wins all around.
It’s not the issue that people will murder dozens. However, it’s not much of a stretch that they’ll murder one.
Tontine.