Monday, October 05, 2015

the grim reader

Look upon my blogular works, ye mighty, and despair, for if my basilisk gaze should fall upon any part of your novelistic oeuvre and feature it on this blog, your days upon this earth are surely numbered and in due course you will feel THE ICY HAND OF DEATH UPON YE, just you wait and see.

Sure enough when Swedish crime author (most famously creator of detective Kurt Wallander, maverick cop, doesn't play by the book etc. etc.) Henning Mankell opened the front door this morning he found a gentleman in a hooded garment waiting for him who'd come about the reaping.

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

Mankell had been living with cancer for about a year and a half, so it wasn't totally unexpected, but nonetheless he's the third-youngest of the eleven authors on the list, and the curse length is well below the average of a little over four years. There's plenty of variation, from two months to nearly eight years, but the point is that CERTAIN DEATH AWAITS YE. Possibly with nasty big pointy teeth, possibly not.

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