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.