He is not buried yet and already the drooling has begun. Everyone from book publishers and biographers to actors and film-makers are on the starting blocks, poised to join the race for every possible remnant and relic of JD Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, who died in his usual solitude on Thursday at 91 years old.

About to erupt is a cultural feeding-frenzy of a kind Salinger would surely have abhorred. Because it will ultimately be about commerce, it is a rush that is certain, as Gawker.com put it, to be "drawn out and bitter". Nor is it likely to be dignified, a spectacle of adults clawing for a dead man's gold that would surely have made Holden Caulfield, Catcher's teenage narrator, chuckle with disgust.

Might a film at last be made of the celebrated novel? (And who, you are asking, among the latest generation of young male actors would be a decent Holden? Zach Ephron or maybe Michael Cera?) Now Salinger is no longer around to sue – something he did without hesitation whenever his privacy or the sanctity of his work were at stake – will biographers now vie with one another to give us a new portrait of the mystery-cloaked scribe?

First, though, there is the question of what manuscripts may or may not be hidden in the New Hampshire hideaway that was his home and virtual prison for over 50 years. If, as repeatedly rumoured, there are as many as 15 books penned by him somewhere inside, will his death remove all constraints and allow for their publication?

It is a tantalising notion that for now remains unanswered. Some have reported in the past that Salinger did indeed toil over new works in a concrete bunker on the 90-acre estate he purchased shortly after the 1951 publication of The Catcher in the Rye.

Some of the suspense would be removed if his representatives and his heirs, notably his two children Margaret and Matthew, would speak up. They may be able to explain what was left behind by Salinger and what stipulations are left in his will about what should be done with any unpublished works. The entertainment world wants to know also whether instructions have been left as regards the rights to the works we know about.

So far no one is cooperating. In the statement announcing his death, his literary agents sent a pretty clear message that there will be no repealing any time soon of his edicts for strict privacy. "In keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy there will be no service, and the family asks that people's respect for him, his work, and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time," they said.

A 1957 letter published last year that was attributed to Salinger suggested that he was far from naive about what would occur following his death.

In it he speaks of making arrangements in his will for his then-wife, Claire Douglas, and any other heirs to be financially protected by the provision to them of the unsold rights to his works. He knew then how valuable they would be – and the scramble they would spark.

"It pleasures me to no end... to know that I won't have to see the results of the transaction," he writes in the letter.