Charles Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", where the eponymous protagonist is killed, ends before the culprit is unmasked, because of the author's death. But most of the clues point to Edwin's uncle John Jasper being the murderer, the reason being his attraction to Rosa, the beloved of his nephew. Many lesser authors have tried completing the novel. The 1935 film with Claude Rains playing Jasper also completes the story.
Nikolai Gogol's classic humorous novel of Tsarist Russia, "Dead Souls", also ends literally in the midst of a sentence. But before doing so, it presents a panoramic view of the Russian society of that time. It also presents in Chichikov, the ultimate scamster. who though unmasked, wriggles out of a tight corner & replaces his new suit of "smoke & flame", a literal as well as a metaphorical symbol of his ill-gotten prosperity, fall from grace & resilient bounce-back.
In the world of music, the most famous example is Franz Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" in B minor. Though he composed the later "The Great C major", he chose not to add to the two movements of the earlier one. Probably he felt, like the later musicologists, that the two movements themselves constituted an artistic whole.
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