Tontine present in work The Wrong Box
La Tontine (1708), a comic play by Alain-René Lesage. A physician, hoping to raise the funds to give his daughter a dowry, buys a tontine on the life of an elderly peasant, whom he then strives to keep alive.
The Great Tontine (1881), a novel by Hawley Smart
The Wrong Box (1889), a comic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. The plot revolves around a tontine originally taken out for some wealthy English children, and the resulting shenanigans as younger family members of the two final elderly survivors vie to secure the final payout. The book was adapted as a film, The Wrong Box, produced and directed by Bryan Forbes, in 1966.
The Secret Tontine (1912), an atmospheric faux-gothic novel by Robert Murray Gilchrist, set in the Derbyshire Peak District during a snowy winter in the late 19th century. The plot involves the potential beneficiaries of a covert tontine, and their scheme to murder their ignorant rivals.
Lillian de la Torre's short story "The Tontine Curse" (1948) features mysterious deaths related to a tontine in 1779, being investigated by Samuel Johnson.
The Tontine (1955), a novel by Thomas B. Costain, illustrated by Herbert Ryman, is set in nineteenth-century England and tells a story centered around the fictional "Waterloo Tontine", established to benefit veterans of the Napoleonic wars. Among other plot twists, shareholders hire an actor to impersonate a dead nominee, and conspire to murder another member.
In 4.50 from Paddington (1957), a Miss Marple murder mystery by Agatha Christie, the plot revolves around the will of a wealthy industrialist, which establishes a settlement under which his estate is divided in trust among his grandchildren, the final survivor to inherit the whole. The settlement is described, inaccurately, as a tontine. K. Tombs uses the term in the same (inaccurate) way in a more recent murder mystery, The Malvern Murders.
Something Fishy (1957), a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, features a so-called tontine under which the investors' sons stand to gain from marrying late.
In the U.S. television series The Wild Wild West, Episode 16 of Season Two (1966–67) – "The Night of the Tottering Tontine" – finds James West and Artemus Gordon protecting a man who is a member of a tontine whose members are being murdered one by another.
"Old Soldiers", an eighth-season episode of the television series M*A*S*H, focuses on a tontine set up among Colonel Potter and several of his Army buddies from World War I. While taking shelter in a château during an artillery barrage, they had found a cache of brandy and drank all but one bottle, which they set aside for the last survivor. After the only other surviving member dies, Potter receives the bottle in the mail and shares it with his staff, drinking first to his departed friends and then to the new ones he has made at the 4077th.
In the Barney Miller episode "The Tontine" (1982), one of the last two surviving family members who invested in the tontine attempts to kill himself so that the other can have the money before growing too old to enjoy it.
In The Simpsons episode "Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in 'The Curse of the Flying Hellfish'" (1996), Grampa Simpson and Mr. Burns are the final survivors of a tontine to determine ownership of art looted during World War II. Grampa eventually kicks Burns out of the tontine for trying to kill him, but before he and Bart can do anything with the art, agents of the US State Department arrive to return the paintings to a descendant of the original owner.
The Mystery of Men (1999), a TV film starring Warren Clarke, Neil Pearson and Nick Berry, deals with four friends in a tontine scheme suddenly realising they will benefit from each other's deaths.
In S. L. Viehl's science fiction multi-volume novel Stardoc (2000), the title character is accused of spreading a plague to several colony worlds, on one of which the colonists had established a tontine. The sole survivor, a little girl, consequently becomes so wealthy that in the second book of the series – Beyond Varallan (2000) – she buys the bank behind the colonies to free the Stardoc from the debt she now owes.
The 2001 comedy film Tomcats features a variation on a tontine where the last investor to get married gets the full amount of the invested funds.
The Diagnosis: Murder episode "Being of Sound Mind" (2001) features a tontine as a motive for murder.
In the Archer episode "The Double Deuce" (2011), Archer's valet Woodhouse is revealed as one of three final survivors of a group of World War I Royal Flying Corps squadron mates who each put £50 into an interest-bearing account, now worth nearly a million dollars. The office workers at ISIS HQ, realizing that a new tontine could capitalize on the high mortality rate of field agents, begin persuading people to join.
The Brokenwood Mysteries episode "Tontine" (2018) centers on a tontine.
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