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Michael Cox, 1948-2009 points to the Telegraph's obit of the English novelist, who died March 31. (He pictured at right in a jacket photo by Jerry Bauer.)

Subhed:
Michael Cox, who died of cancer on March 31 aged 60, was galvanised by his illness to write the novel he had been planning for 30 years; his book The Meaning of Night (2005), a Victorian murder mystery, brought him an advance of nearly half a million pounds - a record for a first novel.

Lovely:

..."What I really wanted to do was replicate what I, as a reader, value most: the unravelling of a well-crafted story," Cox explained.

...Cox began trying to write his novel in the early 1970s. "I'd read Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle, and I knew they always started at the end of the puzzle and worked back. I wasn't confident that I could do it, and I couldn't do it for 30 years. I wrote endless first chapters."

The sentence leading one of these chapters -- the one he kept writing -- leads the novel: "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper..."

The sentence also leads the site of the novel, The Meaning of Night: A Confession, where you may download Part One as a pdf or as an mp3.

Vaguely related: Another Brit's literary moment spurred by illness: Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics, in the Society section of The Guardian. He was a patient with a digestive disease, which was also the fate of many of his fellow sufferers, brought there by something they drank a lot of.

Paling seems to have landed there after an attack of diverticulitis was misdiagnosed as appendicitis, followed by surgery which closed badly and spun into worse.

His tale of his month in the belly ward called Beirut is also wrapped in a subtext about the National Health paying for what people do to themselves -- the sort of flamewars thinking which, spun out, leads to health care only for those whose illness strikes despite a pure and perfect life: Those smote like Job by God or their ancestors' genes.

But it actually sounds like these folks pay bigtime themselves.

 Tags  obit

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