The final book by Patrick O’Brian was not completed. Actually, his last sentence was not completed.

The author of the still-popular Aubrey-Matarin series was 85, and had gotten a start on the 21st edition of the series, when he stopped writing. Perhaps he fell ill. Perhaps he was distracted, and then fell ill.

But his final typeset words end in mid-sentence:

“Oh come, my lord,” said Stephen. “What you say sounds …”

That’s it.

He was perhaps one-third of the way through his 21st book set in the early 19th century, some of the final years of the Age of Sail, and during the Napoleonic Wars.

As is the case in several of his later books, nothing much had happened in this one, and it was not happening with any speed.

Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe in the movie Master and Commander) and Stephen Matarin (Paul Bettany) were in Buenos Aires, preparing to depart for South Africa, where Aubrey is to have his first taste of running a fleet as an admiral.

A sketchy character has caught a ride with them, an officer in the British army on his way to Cape Town, and we assume the soldier (much inferior to sailors in all O’Brian books) will be a protagonist. We have been told he has “been out” (dueled) several times, killing more than one man, and he seems to have a liking for a woman who is Maturin’s new love interest.

But where O’Brian was going with this, how he intended to bring ship to ship action in what was the opening days of the Pax Brittanica … we shall never know.

O’Brian was born in 1914, and he clearly was an Old School character. He was stingy in explaining his background, reacted badly when it was discovered and written about by others.

And he wrote his books in longhand, and the 21st volume of the series is, fairly, entitled The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey, and O’Brian took the story a bit further, in his crabbed handwriting, including a duel (as we suspected), but leaving Aubrey and Matarin somewhere in the south Atlantic.

One reviewer has suggested that publishing the book was a disservice to the author, taking three chapters of unfinished prose — “doodling”, the pundit calls it — and turning it into a book, padding it out with photos of his handwritten pages and a postscript from another reviewer.

Expect to pay full price for the unfinished voyage (and the unfinished sentence), which seems a bit steep. But if you’ve read the first 20, you probably want to read the final three chapters.

But, yes, those final words … seems a bit haunting. Did he fall over dead at his desk? Or was he like the rest of us, planning to get back to his planned activities? We all take things for granted, don’t we.