Was it the butler or the maid? With the candlestick or the kitchen knife? An American magazine wants to give readers the chance to decide, by writing the end of a quintessentially English whodunnit. Budding authors can make literary history by penning the final chapters of a Graham Greene novel. The partially-complete manuscript was written in the 1920s and leaves the door wide open for a thrilling finale.

 
Graham Greene started writing The Empty Chair in 1926 but gave up when he reached 22,000 words. It is a murder mystery story set at a party in an English country house, where guests discover the body of a man called Richard Groves. The reader knows he has been stabbed to death, but not who brandished the blade that killed him.
 
The manuscript, which was never published, was discovered two years ago by Francois Gallix, who was carrying out research at the Humanities Centre in the University of Texas.

“He left quite a lot of unfinished texts in his drawers but the very unusual thing I  found was that for the other manuscripts he mentions them either in his diaries, or his correspondence,  or whatever he was writing. And I  found nothing there about The Empty Chair. It’s probably one of the reasons why no one so far had noticed the manuscript, thinking it's unfinished, so it's perhaps not worth doing anything with it.”

Now the American crime-writing quarterly Strand magazine plans to serialise the book. Editor Andrew Gulli says he will publish it in five consecutive issues and may even hold a competition to complete the story. Gallix says it is an idea the author would have loved:

“This is not totally settled, it’s a possibility and it’s a good possibility because Greene himself played this game at least twice. The first time in 1949, when the New Statesman organised a competition with the prize of one guinea for the best imitation of a Greene novel, and Greene himself sent a short extract under a pseudonym and didn’t get the prize.”

Green wrote the book when he was just 22-years-old and it will be a challenge for anyone prepared to try and finish it, but Gulli says a competition would attract interest from several top authors. He says he’ll leave the final decision to Graham Greene’s estate.

“If that was their prerogative that would be fine with me, but on a larger level I’d like to see it finished. In this story, unlike with the mystery of Edwin Drood [an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens] where you know who the villain is, with this book it’s very, very open ended, it could be literally anyone.”

Listen to an interview with Francois Gallix, who discovered the manuscript