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 loss of life, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his associate, 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 typically flirted with the cartoonish and stylized, noirish dialogue, Mr. Nicholson wrote with verve and biting wit, and he attracted a devoted, if not giant, readership for his prolific output.
His Fb profile as soon as had an inventory of “favored” 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” 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 that did evaluate him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was the New York Instances critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 overview of Mr. Nicholson’s best-known novel, “Bleeding London.”
