Sooner or later, it will have to happen. The conclave to choose a new pope.
Novelists of all hues and colours have been trying to draw up a scenario for the next conclave for many years now.
Maybe there were others but the first I can remember is Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman, published in 1963 (coincidentally on the very day that Pope John XXIII died) about a cardinal from Ukraine who gets elected pope.
That was in the dark days of the Cold War and the book, though otherwise enjoyable, reflects its date.
West's Cardinal Kiril is loosely based on two persons - Cardinal Josef Slipyi, who was freed from captivity in 1963 after pressure by Pope John XXIII and US President John F. Kennedy and bishop Hryhorij Lakota, who had died in a Soviet gulag some years previously.
In a sub-plot, the book speaks about the relationship between the Ukrainian pope and a visionary professor based on Teilhard de Chardin.
Skip a few years, and the 1963 conclave and the two in 1978, the year of the three popes, and we get to May 2000 when Dan Brown published the first of the Robert Langdon novels, Angels and Demons (the next one would be the more popular The Da Vinci Code).
Langdon, an expert on symbols, is called in when a murder is committed with Illuminati scrawled on the victim's chest. Following on this clue, Langdon arrives in time to ward off a catastrophe planned to take place during a conclave.
Next we skip to 2016 and Robert Harris's Conclave. Those who follow Harris and his books know both his meticulous preparation and his focus on the workings of power.
The pope is dead and 75-year-old Cardinal Lomeli, the Dean of cardinals, finds himself saddled with the organisation of the conclave when he was looking forward to retirement.
One hundred and twenty cardinal electors converge on the Vatican and surprises begin to happen, not least the sudden appearance of an unknown cardinal, created in pectore by the dead pope.
Soon four principal figures emerge, representing not just their different geographical area but also four different points of view.
Lomeli slowly finds himself becoming a protagonist from being just the manager of the election.
Lastly we have a recent addition to this growing list of conclave books - The Order by Daniel Silva.
This is the 20th book in the thriller series starring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. (Among the list: The English Assassin, A Death in Venice, Moscow Rules, The Rembrandt Affair, House of Spies, etc).
Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has slipped into Venice for a much-needed holiday with his wife and two young children.
But when Pope Paul VII dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the pope's loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati.
A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect the pope had been murdered. The Swiss guard who was standing watch the night of the pope's death is missing. So, too, is the letter the pope was writing during the final hours of his life. A letter that was addressed to an old friend - Gabriel.
The book then explores the issue which will dominate the coming conclave - the deep rift at the centre of the Catholic church between modernisers and traditionalists, the latter led by the secretive Order of St Helena, an order which is striving to recapture Europe under a continental far-Right.
The Order is plotting to seize control of the papacy at the coming conclave.
Centre to the struggle is a book long hidden in the Vatican's secret archive which calls in question the accuracy of the New Testament's depiction of Christ's death.
The book is more a thriller than an analysis of the forces at play but it is eminently readable with its cracking pace. Whatever the ultimate secret it harbours, its analysis, such as it is, reflects a Church and a society (as evidenced by the recent American presidential poll) riven by a split between the Right and the Left.