Geoff Nicholson obituary

The Guardian

17-02-2025

During 2014, hundreds of photographers, amateurs and professionals, Londoners and tourists, snapped images of 58,000 London streets. The vast project – inspired by the novel Bleeding London – culminated in an exhibition at City Hall and prompted imitation by camera enthusiasts elsewhere in Europe. It was one of the high points of the 50-year career of the author Geoff Nicholson, who has died aged 71.
Bleeding London was the 10th of 17 novels that Nicholson wrote between 1987 and 2024, alongside 10 works of nonfiction, a plethora of short stories and anthology contributions, and several popular blogs. His surreal, complex and sometimes transgressive comedies were only erratically successful from a commercial point of view, although his third novel, What We Did on Our Holidays (1990) was turned into a 2007 film, Permanent Vacation, starring David Carradine.
But several of his works won critical acclaim. Bleeding London (1997) itself and his debut novel, Street Sleeper, were shortlisted for literary prizes. Bedlam Burning (2002) was a New York Times notable book of the year and Day Trips to the Desert (1993) was a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.
Nicholson did not capitalise on these early successes and remained – unlike the more celebrated figures to whom he was sometimes compared, such as Jonathan Coe or Will Self – something of an outsider, at least in the UK. But his work attracted a cult following, nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked between 2006 and 2018.
Living near Hollywood with Dian Hanson, his second wife, whom he married in 2006, Nicholson was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an established presence on the local literary scene. It was there that he began to write more insistently about maps and walking – exploring the relationship between emotions, behaviour and geographic location – a focus which has chimed with growing interest in psychogeography.
Nicholson was born in Hillsborough, a working-class suburb of Sheffield, the only son of Geoffrey, a carpenter, and his wife, Violet. After passing his 11-plus, he attended the city's King Edward VII grammar school, and then, from 1972, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied English. After a further degree in drama at Essex University, he settled in and around London, working in bookshops and pursuing literary ambitions in the evenings.
He scripted a play for Radio 4, wrote travel pieces, food and theatre reviews for Time Out and sundry other outlets and sold sketches for TV shows such as Not the Nine O'Clock News and Chris Tarrant's Saturday Stayback. He had stories published in Ambit, the quarterly counterculture literary magazine. In 1987 JG Ballard, the science fiction writer whom Nicholson succeeded as Ambit's fiction editor, described Street Sleeper as 'witty, zany and brilliantly comic'.
The lead characters in Nicholson's novels are often slightly lost, unsure what to make of what is happening to them. Not infrequently their dilemmas lead to violence. Usually, the denouement is humorous, with multilayered plots resolved in elaborate, improbable, even apocalyptic farces. Having little control over their lives, his characters seek comfort in an intense attachment to things. Nicholson writes a lot about – variously – the electric guitar, deserts and cocktails.
He had a lifelong love of the Volkswagen Beetle, and collected hundreds of toy models of the car. The motor features prominently in two of his novels. Sexual fetishism crops up a lot too, most notably in Footsucker (1995), whose hero is aroused by women's feet, and Sex Collectors, a work of nonfiction published in 2006 that is based on interviews with collectors of pornography.
But as Nicholson got older, his engagements with the world became simpler. Walking is the theme of five of his last eight published works, albeit that in The Miranda (2017), the perambulation comes only after an episode of ultra-violence. The note, though, in this later writing is gentler and the prose ever more crystalline.
Nicholson could dissect and explain the most abstract ideas. As one New York Times reviewer put it, he was 'the rare writer capable of making reference to Jacques Lacan [the French psychoanalyst] without inspiring the reader to toss his book out the window'.
It was a time that coincided with a calmer period in his life. After Dian and he divorced, Nicholson returned to Britain in 2018 and settled in the Essex town of Manningtree. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. For the most part that was controlled and he had a new partner, Caroline Gannon, whom he had first met during the Bleeding London project.
He went out walking, every day, padding streets near and far. Always armed with a camera, he did his research, took photos, picked up items of interest – an unusually coloured rock, a discarded magazine or an item in a junk shop that took his eye.
Much of this discovery fed its way into The Suburbanist, published in 2021, in which Nicholson poked fun at the staid, predictable routine of lower middle-class life and the arrogance of its intellectual detractors. In his final work, the nonfiction Walking on Thin Air (2023), he wrote candidly about his illness, although it was more a celebration of life than of mortality. He did not expect this to be his swansong, but A Life's Journey in 99 Steps proved to be a prophetic subtitle.
He is survived by Caroline.
Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson, writer, born 4 March 1953; died 18 January 2025