Tuesday, January 03, 2017

berger off

Well, so there I was, chortling to myself at how Richard Adams' death had nothing to do with me when the Grim Reaper decided to issue a little reminder about how he was in charge and I'd better watch myself. The way he chose to do it was by knocking off John Berger, art critic, novelist and general overachieving polymath, and, crucially, former book review featuree on this blog, at the age of 90. So, without further ado, here's the current novelist death list - the tally currently stands at fifteen:

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 1y 291d
Elmore Leonard April 16th 2009 20th August 2013 87 4y 128d
Iain Banks 6th November 2006 9th June 2013 59 6y 218d
Doris Lessing 8th May 2007 17th November 2013 94 6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez 10th July 2007 17th April 2014 87 6y 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
Anita Brookner 15th July 2011 10th March 2016 87 4y 240d
William Trevor 29th May 2010 20th November 2016 88 6y 177d
John Berger 10th November 2009 2nd January 2017 90 7y 55d

Having corrected some of the horribly botched maths in earlier versions of this table, I find that Berger's death was the longest-delayed of all those directly attributable to this blog, and that the average time between the fateful blog post landing and the relevant author croaking is a little over four years.

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