I’m doing it. (my pet project :))
I could make it into a point & click text adventure engine, where you play by combining one “objective” with one object (or person, or information) (you have an inventory of informations).
Does anyone know what good mystery novels are in the public domain?
For who is interested: the first problem in this system is that sometimes the speakers in these novels have very dull objectives. Sometimes the only reason they say something is “to gossip” 
But of course I can’t have “gossip” as an objective. So in this case it’s better to just have a normal dialogue.
Another problem is when the only purpose of the speaker is to inform someone else of something. It is uninteresting to create the objective “inform X of Y”. and then expect the player to combine it with X. Better to have this as a non-interactive dialog.
But, in most cases, it seems to works well. For example, if in the book someone says “it’s hot here. how about we go to the beach?”, you implement this in the game as follows. You give the character an objective: “defeat the heat” or something like that. Then the game stops, and you need to combine that objective with the concept of “beach”. (you had that concept in your “mind inventory” because the beach was mentioned previously in another dialogue). And the story goes on.
other example: if a character in the book says “hey we have something in common: we like the same cocktails”, you can implement it like this: you give a character the objective “find something in common with her”, and the player needs to combine this with the cocktails (which are on the table). and the dialog goes on.
This way, we have a mechanical way to turn almost any story into an interactive story, adding quasi-puzzles (puzzles induced by the story itself), without adding new puzzles or changing the dynamics and focus of the story.
Another interesting thing is that this UI idea (you play by combining objective and object) subsumes everything. i.e any ordinary puzzles can be implemented like this. Example: instead of combining “the leaflet with Kate’s face + the wanted poster with guybrush’s face”, you need to combine the objective “have kate jailed” + “wanted poster with guybrush’s face”. (no need to click on the leaflet, you have already proved to have solved the puzzle).
An interesting feature is that, now, if you need to pick up something, you need to have already understood what you need to do with it. To pickup the pen, you need to combine an objective with the pen. You need to declare what you want to do with it. (because there is no pickup verb: there are only two verbs: “look at” and “use for”. if you choose “use for”, you are required to click an objective)
