if only I could have dunmore to help

Generally, Electric Halibut is fair and proportionate and equitable in his dealing out of death - the last five literary victims of the ongoing Curse Of Electric Halibut have all been over 80 - but just occasionally he likes to pluck someone younger to his icy bosom just pour encourager les autres. Don't get complacent, younger novelists, he says, this could happen to you.

Sure enough the latest victim, Helen Dunmore, was a fairly youthful 64, which makes her the third-youngest novelist on this grim list (Iain Banks at 59 is the youngest), and one of only five under 80 of the seventeen that are now on the list. Here's the latest list:

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
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d

You'll notice that Dunmore's curse was the longest to take effect of all, it being a little over nine years since the solitary book review, Talking To The Dead in March 2008. Your Blue-Eyed Boy remains the only other novel of hers that I've read.

She is also the third victim this year, which matches the three in each of 2015 and 2016, though of course the year is only half-gone, so it could be a massacre by December. 2013 is the deadliest complete year so far with four victims. Of course as time goes on and more new authors appear on the list the pool of potential victims increases, assuming that my acquisition of new authors to read books by outstrips the rate of their subsequent demise.