Michael Cox died 31 March 2009 of hemangiopericytoma (a rare vascular cancer), after a long battle with several other cancers. Born 25 October 1948 in Finedon, Northamptonshire, England, he’ll be remembered for his Victorian novel The Meaning of Night, published in 2006.
As a teenager, he was a singer and songwriter, and played guitar and keyboards. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971 with a degree in English literature, he pursed a career as a rock musician, releasing two solo albums under the name Matthew Ellis, and then another album with his band Obie Clayton. In 1977, he left music for the life of an editor, working first for a publisher of health books.
He wrote a biography of ghost-story author M.R. James, which Oxford University Press published in 1983, before hiring Cox as an editor. At Oxford, he edited and co-edited several anthologies of ghost stories, including The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986, with R.A. Gilbert), Victorian Ghost Stories (1991, with R.A. Gilbert), Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection (1992), and The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1996).
He began writing his novel while in college, but, he told The Times of London in 2006, “I wasn’t confident that I could do it, and I couldn’t do it for 30 years.” In the 1990s, his cancer was diagnosed, and he underwent several operations to remove tumors. He retired from OUP in 2002.
In 2004, a brain tumor started to take his sight, and the steroid he was given to reduce the pressure on the optic nerve energized him to pick up his novel. He finished it after the operation to remove the tumor. The book, The Meaning of Night, sold at auction for £430,000 to John Murray Publishers (W.W. Norton published it in the US). The book, according to The New York Times, “is set in an 1850s London awash in fog, footfalls, and fatality. Subtitled ‘A Confession,’ it draws on, and looks winkingly back at, the conventions of Victorian novel-writing in all their purple profusion. Ostensibly a rediscovered manuscript (itself a Victorian narrative conceit), the book is thick with editorial footnotes, snippets of Latin and deliberately florid prose as it tells a story of murder, usurped inheritance, revenge and other unpleasantnesses.”
Norton also published the sequel, The Glass of Time, last year.
Cox is survived by his wife, Desda Crockett (whom he married in 1973), his parents, daughter Emily Cox, two stepchildren, and three grandchildren.