Michael Crichton is back from the dead

Thriller writer Michael Crichton is back from the dead. Or, to be precise, two new novels have been found on the computer of the novelist who died from cancer last November and one is to be published before Christmas this year and the other in 2010.

The bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died at 66, leaving a host of electronic files on his computer, his estate revealed on Monday. The first new novel is called Pirates Latitudes and is an historical thriller set in 17th-century Jamaica. It was complete though unedited, said his UK publisher at HarperCollins, Julia Wisdom. It will be published on November 24.

The second novel is more complicated: Crichton had only written a third of the technological thriller and HarperCollins are looking to employ a 'high-level thriller writer' to complete the story, for a planned publication in 2010.

According to his New York agent, Lynn Nesbit, Crichton left "many, many electronic files" and it is possible there are more novels in incomplete form. But Crichton's editor, Jonathan Burnham, has told the New York Times that there are no plans to create a "posthumous franchise" from the author’s work. "We're not taking a name brand and spinning books out of it," he said.

Meanwhile one of Crichton’s most famous creations was laid to rest last Thursday with the finale of the long-running hospital TV series he created, ER. The show, which at its peak in 1995 was the most-watched drama on US television with an average audience of 32m, and launched George Clooney's film career, went out with a respectable 16.4m viewers - the biggest audience for the final show of a drama series since CBS's Murder She Wrote ended in 1996.