Ten Great Unfinished Novels Trivia Quiz

Answer: Charles Dickens

In 1870, at the age of 58, Dickens was half-way through writing "The Mystery Of Edwin Drood" when he died.

Others did try to puzzle out what Dickens left behind, with several versions published, and in 2012 the BBC produced a TV adaptation.

This was the 15th novel by Dickens and, like several others, was to be published in parts. Six of the 12 had been published at his death. The story was a murder mystery in which the titular character was murdered. Suspicion fell on his uncle.

While writing the parts that were published, Dickens was tight-lipped about the intended outcome.

Answer: Vladimir Nabokov

The story recounted an affair between an unnamed "man of letters" and a nubile 24-year-old called Flora (aka Laura). It was presented as the raw material of a novel that had subsequently been written about the affair.

Writing in the British newspaper "The Guardian" in 2009, William Skidelsky said: "What we are being presented with, then, is a kind of literary conjuring trick. We are invited to believe that we are reading not a made-up story but a slice of real life, before it was brushed up, elaborated upon and turned into fiction."

Nabokov died in 1977, having told his wife, Vera, she should destroy the novel if he didn't live to complete it.

Vera died in 1991 without taking a decision and the manuscript lay in a bank safe. Their son, Dmitri, also spent many years dithering on a decision before deciding to publish the book.

Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald

By the late 1930s, Fitzgerald was working in Hollywood, although some said he found the work beneath him.

He had completed 17 of 31 planned chapters of the novel, enough for some critics to hail it as as masterpiece in progress.

The manuscript was titled "The Last Tycoon", but someone (Fitzgerald?) corrected that to "The Love of the Last Tycoon", and that was how it became known.

It was a tale of Hollywood, tracing the story of a producer. Some said the character was based on certain of those Fitzgerald had encountered.

Writing in the New York Times, J. Donald Adams described the novel thus: "it is the best piece of creative writing that we have about one phase of American life - Hollywood and the movies."

The novel was edited and published in 1941.

You may have noted the "great sled into the sky" remark as being a reference to Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby".

Answer: Mark Twain

Six years after Twain's death a novel was published, which seemed to be pieced together from the three versions.

The tone of "The Mysterious Stranger" was somewhat at odds with that of Twain's other works. It was much darker, and certainly less humorous.

A lot of people had problems with the style of writing. "Tonally ambivalent, philosophically inconsistent, and thematically scattered", was just one reviewer's comment. Others, though, felt it was worthwhile reading for the caustic tone of its anti-religion theme.

Do you really need an explanation of the "two fathoms deep" clue?...

Answer: Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler once said: "The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens, that he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life, except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to leave his clothes."

That is recognisably true of many detectives we can think of in literature, yet Chandler had his hard-bitten Philip Marlowe get married in "Poodle Springs".

Robert B. Parker completed "Poodle Springs", the eighth Philip Marlowe tale, after Chandler's death in 1959. Chandler had left just four chapters behind.

The story was based in a thinly-disguised Palm Springs, with Marlowe hired by a local gambler to trace a photographer who welshed on a $100,000 bet.

From the slim-pickings left behind, Robert B. Parker picked up the tale and, some critics said, out-Chandlered Chandler in style of writing.

Parker, of course, was no slouch when it came to writing private eye fiction. He was the author of around 40 novels centred on his hero, Spenser. Television also picked up on the character in "Spenser: For Hire'" in the 1980s.

Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson

Enough of the manuscript was left for aficionados of Stevenson to claim "Weir Of Hermiston" would have been a masterpiece.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it was a tale of the effects of a conflict on a family.

Several published versions of the manuscript came into being. Later publications reveal "a rather different novel from the bowdlerised version produced posthumously by his friends." [Edinburgh University Press on a re-edited version by Gillian Hughes.]

Answer: Henry James

Henry James often turned a literary microscope on the rich and wealthy in American society in the latter part of the 19th Century.

He was working on a tale of how unimaginable wealth impacted on two families in what was to be his last book. It was published in 1917.

"The Ivory Tower" was one of two books James left unpublished. The other was "The Sense of the Past".

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

Set in the south of France in the 1920s, "The Garden Of Eden" is the story of a young American writer and his glamorous wife, who play a dangerous game when they begin a relationship with the same woman.

"Time" magazine hailed it as vintage Hemingway, "doing what nobody did better".

The novel was published in 1986. The "New York Times" damned the book as "problematic", and was even more scathing of the movie treatment, describing "Hemingway's Garden of Eden" (2010) as "atrocious".

Answer: David Foster Wallace

Some of you may question whether Wallace continues to deserve recognition, given the stories that have surfaced about his abusive treatment of women.

Many people, though, still consider him the greatest voice of his generation and there is little doubt that he was a popular and controversial writer.

Some say Wallace was one of the brightest and most inventive authors of his time, and hailed "Infinite Jest" (1996) as a great novel.

In 1997, he began to write "The Pale King" and had completed about 500 pages before his death by suicide in 2008.

Answer: Albert Camus

Camus was working on "The First Man", a story based on his childhood in Algeria, when he died in a car crash in 1960. His daughter transcribed the unfinished manuscript and it was published in 1994.

That Camus was a football (soccer) goalkeeper at a young age is one of those facts beloved of quiz setters. In truth, his prowess was more than a little exaggerated. It was said he played for Algeria - even for France - but, after playing for his school team in Algiers, Camus continued in goal for the Racing Universitaire Algerios (RUA) junior team. Even that ended in 1930 when, at the age of 18, he contracted tuberculosis.

One of his pithy comments left behind was "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football."

As an aside, the question references a novel, "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" ("Die Angst der Tormanns beim Elfmeter") by Austrian author Peter Handke. Stick with it until you discover what that anxiety was - then throw the book away. (Save yourself the angst of watching the 1972 movie version.)