MICHAEL COXMichael Cox, who died on 31 March, 2009, aged 60, was a British biographer and editor turned novelist.His debut novel, The Meaning of Night (2006), prompted a furious bidding war which resulted in a £500,000 advance from the John Murray publishing house.The book, a sophisticated 600-page Victorian crime thriller, went on to reach the shortlist of the Costa Book Awards ‘First Novel’ prize. He followed it up in 2008 with The Glass of Time which was also set in Victorian England, one of Mr Cox’s areas of interest.He died after a five-year battle with cancer. Ironically, if it hadn’t been for the disease and the threat it posed to his eyesight, he may never have realised his ambition to write a novel. He explained, “Subconsciously I felt, 'I may go blind - if I don't do this now, I'll never do it.’”Michael Cox was born in Northamptonshire in 1948 and was educated at Cambridge. He initially worked as a musician during the 1970s and recorded two albums as Matthew Ellis and one as Obie Clayton.In 1977 he joined the Thorsons Publishing Group. In 1983 he published a biography of the ghost story writer M R James. He then compiled several ghost and crime story anthologies for Oxford University Press who hired him as Senior Commissioning Editor for Reference Books in 1989.He worked for OUP until his rare cancer diagnosis in April 2004 which prompted him to write the novel he had planned for 30 years.He lived in Northamptonshire with his wife Dizzy.Roland Philipps at John Murray paid tribute to him: “In spite of blindness and increasing physical disability, up until days before his death Michael was talking with great excitement about the new novel he was planning."He will be very much missed ... It is a terrible irony that the cancer that brought about his untimely death was also the trigger that made him write The Meaning of Night, the novel that he had been writing in his head for 30 years; he and the reading public were then blessed that he wrote (to his mind and that of many critics) the even stronger The Glass of Time and saw it published in 2008.”
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