Literary Legacy

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp. Once in a magical while, along comes a character who is so larger-than-life, so universally beloved, he outlives the author who created him. For the next generation of authors tapped to tell more of those stories, this isn’t merely a career-changing opportunity: It’s a dream come true. 

Yet authors who write for literary estates are often misunderstood. Skeptics grumble about publishers “cashing in” on big names after they’re gone. More awkwardly, some readers don’t realize the original author is no longer living. (Brian Andrews, who’s co-authored Jack Ryan novels with Jeffrey Wilson, recounts a story of a reader who approached him at an event, gushing, “Mr. Clancy, you’re my favorite author.” Andrews had to tell him: “I’ve got two pieces of bad news for you …”)  

You might be pleasantly surprised to learn estate novels often have much more to do with honoring the original authors’ wishes—and helping their families pay tribute—than with a third party’s payday. Clancy, for instance, had a big hand in what Jack Ryan’s future would look like, greenlighting his first estate writer, Mark Greaney, when he was still alive. Andrews points out that for every legacy series that begins with an author’s death, there are also authors like Lee Child, who recently tapped his brother Andrew to take over writing Jack Reacher. 

“You might have run out of the stories that you feel you can tell in a compelling way about this particular set of characters, or maybe you need somebody else with different perspective or fire in the belly at a certain point to take over,” Andrews says. “With Clancy, he didn’t need the money anymore, and he had plenty of fame, but thinking about his legacy … He wasn’t in great health, he was of the age where he’s starting to think about his own mortality, and at that point, you start saying, I can either pack it up and the characters die with me or pass the torch on to somebody else.” 

In the best light, estate novels are a win-win for readers who can’t get enough, as well as writers who get to step into the shoes of their literary heroes. 

We spoke with some of today’s most prominent estate writers about how it all works behind the scenes, what it’s taught them about the craft and the business, and more. 

Brian Andrews & Jeffrey Wilson (Andrews-Wilson.com) are The New York Times bestselling coauthors of multiple covert ops and action-adventure series, including Tier One, Sons of Valor, and The Shepherds. Their second Tom Clancy novel, Defense Protocol, released in December 2024. Andrews is a U.S. Navy veteran, Park Leadership Fellow, and former submarine officer. Wilson has worked as an actor, firefighter, paramedic, jet pilot, and diving instructor, and was deployed in the U.S. Navy as a combat surgeon with a SEAL Team. 

Andrews and Wilson say they first caught the eye of Tom Colgan—who edited Tom Clancy himself and stayed on to edit his estate books at Putnam—when they were on submission for Tier One. While Colgan didn’t acquire the book (Thomas & Mercer did), he followed their career and later approached them about writing a novel for the W. E. B. Griffin estate’s Presidential Agent series. Once they proved themselves with that project, 2021’s Rogue Asset, he asked if they were interested in applying their unique blend of experience to iconic hero Jack Ryan. With Andrews’ submarine history, it’s fitting their first Clancy offering, Act of Defiance, was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October. 

Don Bentley (DonBentleyBooks.com) is The New York Times bestselling author of eight books including his Matt Drake thrillers, the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr. series, and Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series (beginning with 2024’s Capture or Kill). Bentley has served as an Army Apache helicopter pilot, an FBI Special Agent, and on the Dallas SWAT team. 

Flynn’s literary legacy differs from many others, starting with the circumstances of his untimely death at age 47 in 2013, with books under contract at the time. Flynn’s peer Kyle Mills was hand-picked by the estate to continue the series, which he did for nine more novels. 

Meanwhile, Bentley had been working at a breakneck pace on Jack Ryan Jr. books alongside his own and was weighing next steps. “I was trying to be a full-time writer, and my series [alone] didn’t pay enough for me to do it,” he explains. “And Vince Flynn is my favorite all-time writer. When my second book didn’t sell, I actually took my favorite Vince Flynn book, Protect and Defend, and note-carded it out and stuck it to our bedroom wall. He was the writer I wanted to be, so I tried to dissect how he did things.  

“I talked to my agent and said, ‘This is going to sound crazy, but the series I’d really love to write would be Vince’s series. I don’t know that Kyle is ever going to stop writing this, but what do you think?’” He asked at the exact right time: Mills was stepping aside. 

Bentley says that while he had a great experience with the Clancy estate, the Flynn estate operates more like a small family-owned business, headed by Emily Bestler, his editor, and Sloan Harris, his agent. “They still get choked up when they talk about him,” he says. “[The interview with] Sloan was more of an in-depth conversation about the series itself and what I thought of Mitch Rapp, what made him unique, why did I want to write him.” 

Not only did Bentley get the gig, he also continues the tradition of doing book events in Flynn’s St. Paul hometown—and joins the family for dinner every time. 

Brian Freeman (BFreemanBooks.com) is The New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels, including the Jonathan Stride and Frost Easton series, the International Thriller Writers Award-winner Spilled Blood, the Edgar Award finalist The Deep, Deep Snow, and his Macavity Award-winning debut, Immoral. In 2019, he was selected by Putnam and the Robert Ludlum estate to continue Ludlum’s Jason Bourne franchise. His sixth Bourne novel, The Bourne Vendetta (#20 in the Bourne universe) released in January 2025.  

“Ludlum I think was one of the earliest and biggest of the legacy programs, and there are a lot of Ludlum universe books out there—multiple authors over the years,” Freeman explains. But readers might not realize that in Ludlum’s lifetime, the Bourne series was a trilogy—only three of the 20 books available today. “In the case of Bourne, it really did not take off until after the movies started coming out. The Matt Damon films were so popular that I think it was clear there was a demand to bring back Bourne on the literary side as well.” 

This explains the uncommon gap between Ludlum’s The Bourne Ultimatum in 1990 and Eric Van Lustbader’s Book #4, The Bourne Legacy, in 2004. Freeman says Van Lustbader was chosen to revive the series based in part on his friendship with Ludlum, penning 11 books before the estate switched publishers, at which point Freeman’s agent asked if he was interested in being considered. It was an easy yes: The Bourne Identity was one of his all-time favorites. The new editor, Tom Colgan, seasoned from his Clancy estate work, wanted to know Freeman’s vision.  

“There had been so many iterations of Jason Bourne in the public consciousness,” Freeman says. “My feeling was that it didn’t work to try to build on anything that had come before … that to make it work we needed to do something completely different.” Freeman’s pitch? “To go back to the very beginning and recreate that character, so that it really felt like Ludlum’s original vision of Bourne, but move the character forward, bring him into the modern era, make him younger again, surround him with basically an all-new background, all new sub-characters, all new plots, and essentially reboot the series from the ground up.”  

Freeman won the job: “And that was how The Bourne Evolution took shape.” 

A&W: I think the first question every estate author asks is, “Do you want me to try to write like the original author?” Tom Colgan’s advice was: Do not try to imitate the master, because you will fail. Also, that would create a tremendous amount of stress because now you’re going to second-guess every sentence you write. He said, “I didn’t recruit you to write the book because I thought you wrote like him. I recruited you to write the book because you’re good storytellers, and I think you’re going to do a great job with whatever plot you come up with for this series.” So, the guidance is, then: Be faithful to the characters, respect the legacy, but write your own book. Without that mandate, I think no one would want to do this job.  

Freeman: When I first got the gig, my initial response was, Oh my God! [giddy], and my second response was, Oh, my God [serious]. It doesn’t matter how much time passes: It’s intimidating to step into the shoes of a giant like Ludlum. He was truly one of my writing idols growing up. And I wanted to do justice to his character, so there was a lot of pressure. But it’s certainly true that because there had been 40 years since the original release of The Bourne Identity, it gave me a degree of freedom to go in a new direction. Because I don’t think anyone would expect four decades later that you’d still have Bourne dealing with Vietnam and Watergate … 

[The question of how to handle it stylistically] was one of the things that I spent a lot of time at the beginning thinking through. [Colgan’s advice not to imitate the master] was really good. … Yet at the same time, I think to make it authentic as a Ludlum novel, you need to be influenced by how Ludlum told his stories. It’s not just about plotting and characters—he had a distinctive prose style. It was very breathless, very dramatic, he used to get teased by reviewers about his use of italics and exclamation points …  

But it was such a distinctive style that if you tried to replicate that style, it would come across as a caricature. So, I was trying to let the Ludlum style feel laid into my style, so what comes out is a little bit Ludlum and a little bit Freeman. … That has worked well to make it feel Ludlum-esque but not try to imitate what he was doing. 

Bentley: When Kyle got the gig, he said, “Send me whatever Vince has on this book”—[expecting] maybe a box of notes by his desk. What he got was a document with three sentences in it, and that was all Vince had written. There were no notes, no suggestion of the story. Vince’s final book was called The Last Man and Kyle’s first book was called The Survivor, and Kyle calls that book a forgery—what he means is, he went to great lengths to try to mimic Vince’s writing style, and he took great pride in taking those three sentences and putting them in the book. Kyle made that series his own going forward, but he would still look very closely at words Vince used. … 

People were very apprehensive when I took over. So, my philosophy was, because Capture or Kill is a throwback to Vince’s era—it falls between his last two books, Pursuit of Honor and The Last Man—I went back and read those books over and over. But I knew I couldn’t write the way he did, and I knew if I tried that I’d spend more time concentrating on the syntax than the spirit of the book, so I didn’t try to do that. 

Bentley: Kyle was an incredible gentleman and bent over backwards [for me]—starting with the fact that when they announced it, for every post on social media where someone would say, “Why are you leaving? I don’t know if Don can do this,” he’d respond, “Don’s the right choice.” … 

[Kyle gave me] summaries of every book, he had all the books in Word so you could search them, he had made a massive series bible. It’s at least 20 different documents, plot, active characters, all that stuff. 

I hate talking about works in progress [normally] but I was nervous about this book, so we spent an hour on the phone where I went through what I was thinking, and he was unbelievably helpful. I can’t say enough good things about how hard he worked to make it a good transition. 

A&W: We asked Mark Greaney and Marc Cameron for advice. Another cool thing about [the Clancy universe] is, Tom Colgan involves current and former Clancy authors in the decision-making process of who the heirs are going to be. I like that there’s this community; it’s almost like we’re going to try to safeguard this special thing that is the Clancy legacy … 

There is one rule: Jack Ryan is immutable. He’s Captain America. Jack Ryan is not going to lie or cheat or have an affair. He’s not going to take a bribe; he’s not going to wilt under moral pressure or scrutiny. He will do the right thing. He will stare down danger. His character is incorruptable. And if you follow that rule, you can do whatever else you want. But that’s your lone star.  

Freeman: I don’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s vision other than Ludlum. Eric did a great job over his books, but that was his vision. … 

There was no series bible, and the estate did not put any guardrails on what I was doing. For the first book, I mapped out where I was going with the plot, and I wrote a few chapters so they could get a sense of where I was taking the series, and they gave the green light. One of the things I was proudest of was when The Bourne Evolution was done, Tom sent the manuscript to the estate, and they came back and said, “We wouldn’t change a word.” And I’ve loved hearing from Ludlum fans who’ve told me, “It’s like having Ludlum back in our lives.” 

It’s been nice also finding out there are a lot of folks—amazingly—who had never [read] Bourne before and now discovered Bourne as a literary character by reading my books. So that’s been exciting on both ends. 

Freeman: Well, the interesting thing is, I don’t like action heroes to be immutable. I like them to change and grow, to evolve as three-dimensional characters as the series goes on. You can definitely have different versions of that: I think the Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher vision would be, you know, the readers are looking for the same hero in every book and that’s what keeps them coming back. And that’s perfectly fine. 

For me, what has made Bourne so enduring is not that he doesn’t change but that he does. The essence of Bourne is his psychological complexity—he’s lost his memory; he’s struggling with existential questions of who he is and what his moral stature is. As a result, he can’t be the same in every book … that’s what gives him his special character as an action hero. So, I’ve really allowed Bourne to change a lot in the course of these books.  

Bentley: First, as a reader, Vince Flynn was the first writer to write this post-9/11 hero whose job was to hunt down his nation’s enemies. … There’s part of writing technothrillers where you have to get the details right, but there’s also an aspect of capturing the ethos of the men and women who do this job for real. His characters were believable because they were like people I’d had the opportunity to serve alongside. 

And then as a writer, he was a huge inspiration to me because his first book didn’t sell. He self-published it and he was a scrapper and then he had this big turn. 

A&W: It’s important for people to know that we’re trying to honor the characters and we’re doing it because we were fans first. I mean, I read Red October on a submarine chasing Russians around—that’s pretty cool to get to write the sequel to that book that helped inspire me to military service. 

As Navy veterans, not only is this an opportunity to honor the estate, but to honor the service and sacrifice of the men and women who are serving in the armed forces. … The next generation of service men and women are hopefully people who are reading this book now and saying, “I want to do that.” 

Bentley: People talk a lot about the fact that Vince’s name on the book is really big and mine is small. … Well, I’m writing in Vince’s universe, he created it. 

It isn’t that we as authors have somehow finagled the rights … the estate retains all the IP to it. But just as a fan, I’m glad that somebody’s still telling stories in the Tom Clancy universe. I’m glad that Kyle didn’t let Vince’s universe die … and now I get to tell stories with the same characters. So, I certainly understand how people react that way, but if you’re a fan, why wouldn’t we want to have somebody tell more stories in that universe? 

Freeman: Most people ask if I know Matt Damon. [Laughs.] … There has clearly been a wonderful cache that comes along with doing the Bourne series. It’s been a tremendous honor and opportunity. The books are incredibly fun to write. My own books tend to be very emotional psychological mysteries, and you really have to be digging down deep into your soul to write them. The Bourne books are fun. I love the action, I love the psychological complexity of the character, so it’s been some of the most enjoyable writing I’ve done in my career.