When authors die, some of their work lives after them. In or out of print, it’s bound and sitting on shelves. But another chunk of inventory survives the author, often to the chagrin of his or her heirs: unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. What to do with this material?

Writer, director and theatre maestro Jon Lipsky, of West Tisbury, was confronted with just such a dilemma when his father, author Eleazar Lipsky (1911-1993), left behind a stack of research books and a synopsis for a riveting historical saga.

Eleazar Lipsky’s first book, a mystery called The Kiss of Death, was made into a movie starring Victor Mature, with a young Richard Widmark in the villain role who famously thrusts an old lady in her wheelchair down a flight of stairs. As Jon Lipsky writes in a letter to the West Tisbury Library, “This story, along with others like The People Against O’Hara that was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy, put my father in the top ranks of the Mystery Writers of America who helped create the film noir genre.”

Lipsky Sr. cut his teeth as a writer, as writer’s should, on something other than writing: He was a lawyer working in the homicide bureau in New York city as an assistant D.A. under the legendary Frank Hogan. Son Jon writes, “It was the law that helped my father come of age as he mixed it up with policemen, detectives, hoodlums and various lowlifes. It was the law that gave him his moral compass as he matured. There was something about its impartiality, its equality, and its love of truth that gave him a lever to tell human stories, not about the law, but about people caught up in the law; stories of the human heart.”

But it is Eleazar’s posthumous synopsis and pile of research books that hint at a new direction the accomplished mystery writer was preparing to take. Yes, law entered into the story, but it’s in the form of the terrifying legal shenanigans of the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century, a system that prescribed as the ultimate punishment the auto de fe, burning at the stake. Lipsky, Sr., however, for his title reserved the literal translation of Auto de Fe, Acts of Faith, to hint at a more redemptive element in the tale.

Today at 5 p.m. at the West Tisbury library, Jon Lipsky, in a presentation called Boxing My Father, will relate his version of Acts of Faith as he remembered the proposed book from his father’s musings on the subject, in addition to the facts as they’re laid down in the synopsis.

The story is a wildly colorful tapestry of a Spanish lawyer’s attempt to save his cousin from the auto de fe for burning candles on Friday evenings, a possible hold-over from unlawful Judaic practice. A young Cervantes meanders through the story, as does Francis Drake in his apprentice days as a pirate. The action swings from Mexico to Spain to Holland to London to Constantinople. Along the way we meet an actual historical figure, Dona Gracia of the House of Nasi, the powerful Jewish banking family whose reach stretched from Holland to all corners of Europe (now there’s an historical novel all by itself). The Battle of Lopanto and the attack on England by the Spanish Armada all enter into the roller-coaster suspense of the story.

Jon Lipsky’s intent is to share his father’s notes, synopsis and research materials in the hopes of inspiring a new writer of vision and talent to pick up the project and run with it. As Lipsky Jr. writes in his letter to the library: “Among these tomes you will find books on Sir Francis Drake, the Mexican Inquisition, the Marrano Jews, the Byzantine Empire, the Jewish banking houses, Shakespeare’s London, the Spanish Armada, and on and on. I commend these books to the West Tisbury Public Library as sweet relief from the burden they have weighed upon me. On the one hand, I can’t throw these books away or sell them (some of them I think are relatively rare) because they represent not only my father’s labor but a portrait of the breadth of his imagination. On the other hand, I can’t use these books to write the novel he never wrote because a) I don’t have the stamina, and b) I have my own damn work to do.”

Lipsky Jr. told the Gazette that after his talk on Friday, he hopes to open up a discussion wherein audience members can share their own thoughts and experiences with materials left behind by deceased family members. He also plans to urge people to get connected to their relatives’ memories and insights while they’re still fully alive. “There are some great stories out there and we need to devour them!” he enthused.

Regarding Jon Lipsky’s self-described “own damn work,” his selection of short plays, Around The Volcano, directed by M.J. Bruder Munafo, will debut next week at the Vineyard Playhouse: more on that in the very near future.