The Plot Thickens: Three Novels About Death and Tangible Personal Property

January is the perfect month to cozy up with a good book — and the perfect time to read a novel about probate that isn’t really about probate. You don’t have to look hard to find stories about how the living unravel mysteries left behind by someone who died in popular fiction.  In this blog post, I’ll discuss three novels with plots that all revolve around how tangible personal property is handled after someone dies.

Peng Shepherd’s fantastically fun novel The Cartographers, tells the story of Nell Young, a disgraced mapmaker who discovers a rare map hidden in her estranged father’s desk at work. Nell‘s father, who was also a cartographer, died suddenly at work in the New York Public Library’s Map Division. When Nell is left alone in her father’s office shortly after learning about his death, she finds a leather portfolio in a secret drawer in his desk. Like any character worth her salt who discovers something in a hidden drawer in the first few chapters of a novel, Nell takes it home and finds a map and a mystery that will take her places she never imagined existed. Nell, as the only child of her widowed father, may well have had the right to the map absent a Will as her father’s only heir. Although he went to great lengths to keep Nell – and everyone else – from discovering the map while he was alive, he did not go far enough to prevent Nell from getting ahold of the map after he died.

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, is an equally fantastic but very different novel about what happens when someone stumbles upon personal property that belongs to someone who died and takes it for themselves. In Yellowface, June Hayward is an unsuccessful novelist who steals an unpublished manuscript from her friend, Athena Liu, after Athena dies in a bizarre accident during a night out celebrating her latest literary success. June edits the manuscript, a novel about Chinese laborers during WWI, and publishes it as her own work. While it is not surprising that June finds herself in increasingly uncomfortable situations as her lie spins out of control, Yellowface is never boring as it takes on cultural appropriation, the publishing industry, and social media. Here, Athena was single and did not have children when she died. Her father was also dead, so her mother was her only heir and would have held the rights to Athena’s literary estate absent a Will indicating otherwise. June could have asked Athena’s mother for permission to finish the unpublished manuscript and for publication under Athena’s name, but she did not. Instead, we get a great story.

The Writing Retreat, by Julia Bartz, is also about a writer who takes tangible personal property in the form of unpublished manuscripts from other writers who just happen to be dead. Here, a struggling young author named Alex is at first overjoyed to be invited to a writing retreat hosted by a well-known author, Roza Vallo. The retreat is hosted at Vallo’s remote country house in winter, beyond cell phone coverage and with the roads into and out of the house blocked by snow for much of the book. Alex doesn’t take long to discover that writers who volunteered to live in seclusion for the writing retreat are being held captive. Without giving too much away, Vallo wants to publish the work created by the authors at the retreat as her own, and she will use any means necessary to obtain the rights to publish the stories under her name. To this end, Vallo engages in some seriously sinister contract negotiation tactics. And, if a writer happens to die before assigning the rights to their work to her, Vallo is not above publishing the dead author’s work under her own name. This is not unlike the behavior of the protagonist in Yellowface, where tangible personal property in the form of a manuscript is stolen from the estate of a deceased writer.

The Writing Retreat, unlike Yellowface and The Cartographers, is a thriller with more suspense – and more gore – than either of the other two books. And, while none of these books could be described as a novel about probate, they all involve a plot that turns on what happens when somebody takes tangible personal property from the estate of somebody who died. Happy reading!