People disappearing unexpectedly is a fact of life in The Sopranos, but creator David Chase has accidentally cleared up the lingering mystery over what exactly happened to Tony Soprano in that final scene in the diner. Sadly, it's not good news for him.

In the new book The Sopranos Sessions (which makes the New Jersey crime family sound more like a winsome doo-wop group than was probably intended) Chase lets slip that - and there's a spoiler warning here, in case you're yet to catch up on a show that ended 12 years ago - Tony Soprano did actually die.

"When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten's, you just meant, 'I think I have two more years’ worth of stories left in me,'" co-author Alan Sepinwall puts to Chase.

"Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end… Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting," replies Chase. "But we didn’t do that."

"You realise, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene," prompts co-author Matt Zoller Seitz. There's a big pause, then Chase replies: "F*** you guys."

Death scene! As you well know, the final scene of The Sopranos cuts to black very abruptly just after Tony's stuck Journey on the jukebox in the diner. Then there's a little pause - a little mark of respect for the big guy, it turns out - before the credits roll.

Some fans have interpreted that as Tony being taken out, especially after the hints that you'd not even hear your death coming earlier in the season, but others chose to imagine Tony taking over the New York mob or jacking it all in and moving to Hawaii for a quiet retirement. Well, sorry. He's dead. He's very, very dead, and there's nothing you can do about it.