Julian Rathbone 1935-2008

The novelist Julian Rathbone has died at the age of 73. His novels Joseph and King Fisher Lives were both nominated for the Booker Prize in the 1970s.

There's an obituary in The Guardian by Nick Coleman.

Rathbone was an old-school libertarian lefty. His detestation of privilege and the structures which maintain it was profound. His contempt for them was expressed by turn frighteningly, wittily and sexily, and often all at once, but never, ever dully or rhetorically. There are crime novels in his canon and there are thrillers, but he was by no means a genre writer. Rather, he deployed a rampant imagination to conceive of worlds he might intrude on to get to what he needed to say.

And here's an interview where Rathbone talks about a variety of his books.