Really this is more of a GQ question, but since it deals with writing I figured CS would be a better place to start. If an author dies in the middle of writing a series what usually happens? Can the publisher use the authors notes (would they HAVE the authors notes?) to give them to another author to finish the series with? Would the authors surviving family decide? How long does this process usually take?
As a for instance, recently Robert Jordan passed away. Will the Wheel of Time ever be completed? Say Stephen King had died in that car accident years ago…would The Dark Tower ever have been completed? I know when Robert Howard died other authors were given some of his notes to complete several of the Conan books…and then later they were allowed(?) to write additional Conan books on their own. I think this happened with some of Tolken’s works as well. Are there any other examples of authors dieing and other authors being given the nod to complete their works? Is my assumption right that it’s up to the publisher to choose a new author(s)…or is it up to the family/estate?
You’ve got two parties whose interest may be aligned but might not be: the author’s estate and the publisher. There may be contracts that allow the publisher to continue or the author may have asked that it not be continued after their death. The author’s estate might not want the gravy train to end and push to continue pumping out books based on anything that they think can tie back to the author or the publisher might decide that the sales weren’t that great on the books and the loss from switching writers isn’t worth it. There’s no set way to do this and whatever happens is going to be dependent on what the estate and publisher agree to.
And detailed notes instructing his heirs and publishers to wait seven years between installments.
Seriously, I’d pay any price they asked for a copy of the NOTES, not the finished product.
Yeah, apparently the final WOT book is basically completely written in rough draft form, and his wife was his editor anyway so she’s just going to polish it and it’ll be out.
An author is brought in to finish and is acknowledged: Terry Bisson completed Walter Miller, Jr.'s St. Lebowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. Bisson was quite open about his role, but didn’t take cowriting credit.
An author is brought in and not acknowledged: the V. C. Andrews novels.
If the book is close, it’s just published: Tom Reamy died while editing his brilliant Blind Voices. You can see one major plot point left hanging, but the book was published as he left it.
C.S. Forester had another Hornblower novel underway when he died. Patrick O’Brian had the 21st Aubrey/Maturin book partly done when he joined the choir invisible. Both partial books were eventually published.
Yet these are clearly cases where the authors died not in mid-series, but right at the end.
Neither author is allowed to die until they finish their series. I wish both Gabaldon and Martin would learn to write a bit faster!
By any chance do you have a cite for that? It’s the first I’ve heard about it and I’m curious.
Lots of good info in this thread. I guess I didn’t realize that it depended so much. Not being a published author myself I guess I assumed that authors of series like that would have to sign a contract or something and share their notes with the publisher in case something abrupt happened to them mid-series.
The above mentioned Patrick O’Brian unfinished book ends with:
“Some days of quite untypical S[outh] African weather
slowed the squadron [del]and
possible[/del] and it [del]was[/del] [may] well have
been during the conversation”
I don’t think he actually keeled over pen in hand, but certainly that’s as far as he got.
C.S. Forester died before completing Hornblower During the Crisis (which isn’t exactly mid-series, since he’d already written about all stages of Hornblower’s career, although this takes place chronologically mid-series. I think everyone was wondering what the hell Hornblower was doing during Trafalgar.) He apparently left notes, but not much, as they’re covered in a bland couple of lines at the end of the published edition.
C. Northcote Parkinson proposed a somewhat different ending (and much more satisfactory) in his bio of Hornblower:
It looks like Octavia Butler made it through just the first book of a trilogy when she died. Has anyone heard anything about whether the other books will be picked up by anyone or whether she’d made any notes, or anything? We’ve had a rocky relationship, but all in all I like her, and I was curious
Douglas Adams died in the middle of writing “The Salmon of Doubt”, which he intended as a third Dirk Gently book, and the raw material he left behind for it was published in a collection of his writings (essays and the like) given that title.
Ed McBain died without finishing the series of 87th Precint books with alphabetical one word titles. He always stated that the last one would be EXIT, but it was never written.
He apparently abandoned the idea sometime after 1997, since he already had both an H and an F title. And that doesn’t even count the second L of Lullaby. Or 2001’s Candyland which was billed as a “collaboration” of McBain and Evan Hunter.
Maybe Sue Grafton convinced him it wsn’t such a good idea, after all.
