Geoff Nicholson, whose darkly comedian literary novels and eclectic nonfiction had been filled with characters outlined by their obsessions — with cartography, Volkswagen Beetles, city strolling, jokes and sexual fetishes, lots of which had been enduring pursuits of Mr. Nicholson himself — died on Jan. 18 in Colchester, England, northeast of London. He was 71.
His dying, in a hospital, was from continual myelomonocytic leukemia, his accomplice, Caroline Gannon, mentioned. It’s a uncommon bone marrow most cancers, although, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly noticed, “not uncommon sufficient, clearly.”
In novels with far-fetched plots, characters who usually flirted with the cartoonish and stylized, noirish dialogue, Mr. Nicholson wrote with verve and biting wit, and he attracted a devoted, if not massive, readership for his prolific output.
His Fb profile as soon as had a listing of “preferred” books whose first two titles had been “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Large Sleep,” a thumbnail distillation of his personal oeuvre of intellectual plundering of lowbrow tradition.
Mr. Nicholson was a verbal jokester, whether or not in bold fiction or in additional prosaic writing. For the “About” web page of his web site, he annotated his personal Wikipedia entry. In response to Wikipedia’s assertion that his work was “in contrast favorably” to that of Kingsley and Martin Amis, Will Self and Zadie Smith, Mr. Nicholson wrote, “I don’t recall anyone ever evaluating me to Kingsley Amis, however I suppose they may have.”
One one who did evaluate him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was the New York Occasions critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 assessment of Mr. Nicholson’s best-known novel, “Bleeding London.”
“As he has performed previously,” Ms. Kakutani wrote, “Mr. Nicholson nimbly weaves his eccentric characters’ overlapping lives right into a wacky, black-humored farce, a farce that mixes the intelligent excessive jinks of an Alec Guinness Ealing comedy with the satirical wit of Kingsley Amis.”
In “Bleeding London,” which was on the shortlist for the Whitbread Award, three protagonists are variously obsessive about mapping town.
(The novel impressed tons of of photographers in 2014 to snap 58,000 footage of London streets for an exhibition at Metropolis Corridor.)
Maps had been a recurring theme of Mr. Nicholson’s. In his novel “The Metropolis Underneath the Pores and skin” (2014), a type of cartographic thriller, girls are kidnapped and their backs tattooed with crude maps, earlier than being freed into an unnamed dystopian metropolis. One character is a clerk in a map retailer.
Mr. Nicholson collected maps for a lot of his life. He advised The Los Angeles Occasions: “I’m a little bit of a serial obsessive in that I get deeply curious about issues for a short while. And as a novelist, I’m at all times considering, ‘Is there a e book on this?’”
The protagonist of his novel “Hunters and Gatherers” (1994) is a bartender who’s engaged on a e book about oddball collectors and their heaps of stuff.
“Gathering is an act of appropriation,” the character observes, in what could possibly be a imaginative and prescient assertion for Mr. Nicholson. “The world is bigoted and disconnected. By beginning a set you begin to make connections. You determine what issues and what’s precious. You make a neat world.”
In The Occasions, Ms. Kakutani wrote, “Certainly, his personal novel stands as a captivating little testomony to the ordering impulses of artwork.”
Different obsessions of Mr. Nicholson included VW bugs — which featured prominently in two novels, “Nonetheless Life With Volkswagens” (1996) and “Gravity’s Volkswagen” (2009) — and sexual fetishes. He was the creator of “Footsucker” (1995), a homicide thriller starring an unapologetic foot fetishist, and “Intercourse Collectors” (2006), a nonfiction work about connoisseurs and accumulators of pornography.
Emily Nussbaum wrote in a Occasions assessment: “He’s such an interesting author that you really want him to succeed. Sadly, Nicholson’s chosen territory seems to be surprisingly unsexy.”
Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former mannequin who edited a fetishist journal, Leg Present. After dwelling collectively in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Hanson turned the editor of sex-themed books for the luxurious artwork writer Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled within the Nineteen Sixties kitsch of his house in a geodesic dome within the Hollywood Hills.
Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson was born on March 4, 1953, in Sheffield, England, within the industrial Midlands east of Manchester. He was the one little one of Geoffrey and Violet Nicholson. His father was a carpenter.
He studied English at Gonville & Caius School on the College of Cambridge, and drama at Essex College.
He printed early tales in a literary journal, Ambit, whose prose editor was J.G. Ballard, the creator of dystopian science fiction novels. Mr. Nicholson succeeded Mr. Ballard within the function, and he went on to publish work by Jonathan Lethem, Nick Sweeney and others.
In all, from 1987 to 2023, Mr. Nicholson printed 17 novels and 10 works of nonfiction. He could possibly be sensitive about his prolificacy, which was generally talked about by reviewers.
“I’ve printed 20 books in 22 years (some fairly quick), and I’d say that’s not extreme, on condition that I don’t have a day job,” he wrote in an essay in The Occasions in 2009 about the truth that reviewers often talked about his output. “However correct or not, ‘prolific’ undoubtedly didn’t really feel like an unalloyed praise.”
An early marriage, to Tessa Robinson, resulted in divorce, as did his marriage to Ms. Hanson. Ms. Gannon is his solely survivor. She was one of many photographers on the “Bleeding London” undertaking, and Mr. Nicholson and he or she turned a pair in 2018 when he moved again to England after his second divorce, to the village of Manningtree in Essex.
In his later years, Mr. Nicholson’s obsessions simmered down a bit, from fetishism to strolling. He wrote memoir travelogues, for which he most popular ambulating regionally to wilderness trekking. “The Misplaced Artwork of Strolling” (2008) was impressed by his behavior of fixing plot twists in his novels on lengthy walks. In “Strolling in Ruins” (2013), the deserted websites he explores embrace the pale environs of his youth in Sheffield.
In his ultimate e book, “Strolling on Skinny Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps” (2023), Mr. Nicholson wrote: “I’m going to locations. I stroll once I’m there, I go searching, I write about what I see and really feel. It’s not the one factor I do with my life, however it’s most likely the most effective half.”
The e book was steeped within the data that his life was more likely to be shortened by most cancers, although naturally he handled his circumstances extra with gallows humor than with non secular introspection.
“Nicholson’s writing profession has been diverse, admirable and brave,” Tom Zoellner wrote reviewing the memoir for The Los Angeles Overview of Books. “He stops to note uncommercial and even weird topics, shunning well-traveled roads. He goes the place he likes. He will get out usually. No one can imitate him.”
