The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Howzabout Anais Nin, whose will stipulated that her diary could only be published after all those whose exploits were detailed in it were dead? Her husband Hugo held on for a while.

like a subscription card sliding out of a careless subway commuter's magazine, to drift down to the filthy floor of Friday.

That's beautiful.

If Nin kept back her unexpurgated diaries till everyone who figured prominently died, they'd still be unpublished. Gore Vidal, for example, still lives, and I believe Nin's other husband -- the Los Angeles one that she had for the latter part of her life while still married to Hugo -- just died this year.

(I should have put "unexpurgated" in quotes.)

(Incidentally, how do you die just prior to being the oldest? Doesn't dying disqualify you?)

Agatha Christie? Because it tells the true story of her controversial disappearance?

Well, oldest at the time of deciding to publish, maybe? I mean, she died just before publication. It's not like calling Steinbeck the oldest when Oprah resurrected East of Eden.

Scraps, has hit the main question -- it was indeed Agatha Christie, who was 86 when she de-vaulted the manuscript and sent it in for publication.

But the book said nothing about her 1926 disappearance (I don't think she ever changed her original story of nervous breakdown/amnesia, though I understand people doubt it). Anyone want to guess why it was held back for so long?

Because the novel implied a close friend of hers was a murderer, so she waited until that person died.

Gore Vidal? Man, that Anais really got around.
Agatha kept the ms. in a bank vault until the coupon had matured? Till her sciatica subsided? Till she had a better idea for the ending? Till the cows finally came home?

The depth of the friendship and attraction between Nin and Vidal varies wildly (as is so often the case with Nin) depending on who's telling the story. Certainly Nin was interested in Vidal, and they did socialize; Vidal scorns the idea that there was or could have been more to it than that.

Nin did get around; James Merrill was another unlikely (and unwilling) target of her affections in the 1940s.

As for Christie -- she killed off Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple in her later books, didn't she? Had she written their deaths years earlier and kept them unpublished till she knew she was going to die?

Sorry I'm just now getting to this -- it was a hectic, 3rd-birthday weekend.

Scraps is mostly right: It was the last Miss Marple novel -- Sleeping Murder. Christie wrote the conclusions to both Miss Marple's career (she doesn't die), and Poirot's (he does) during World War II, and locked them away. They were released in the 1970s, after she was sure she wouldn't be writing any more.