is there an eco in here? not any more

Recoil in horror, readers, as the Electric Halibut LIIIIIIBRARY OF DEEEEEEAAAAATH claims another victim. This time it's Italian polymath Umberto Eco: novelist, philosopher, semiotician, literary critic, leg spin bowler, masseur, plasterer, surgeon, groovy cat, gentleman, scholar and acrobat. A formidable CV indeed, but one that did him no good: once I'd read The Name Of The Rose and posted a review to this blog, it was literally guaranteed that he was going to die at some unspecified point in the near, medium or distant future. And so it proved.

The roll call of those directly and specifically slaughtered by this blog, therefore, now reads as follows:

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	2y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	7y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	7y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	7y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d

Eco's death doesn't affect the stats much, as it happens, since the average age for authors to be offed by my book reviews is around 80, and the average time for the curse to take effect is around four years. My nominees from June 2015 (on the occasion of James Salter's death) were Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge and Milan Kundera. Since I failed to spot Eco then those may as well stand for next time.

Here's an interesting long and wide-ranging interview Eco gave to the Paris Review in 2008, during the course of which he inexplicably failed to predict my hand in his eventual demise.