Geoff Nicholson, Author of Darkly Comic Novels, Dies at 71

Geoff Nicholson, whose darkly comic literary novels and eclectic nonfiction were full of characters defined by their obsessions — with cartography, Volkswagen Beetles, urban walking, jokes and sexual fetishes, many of which were enduring interests of Mr. Nicholson himself — died on Jan. 18 in Colchester, England, northeast of London. He was 71.

His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”

In novels with far-fetched plots, characters who often flirted with the cartoonish and stylized, noirish dialogue, Mr. Nicholson wrote with verve and biting wit, and he attracted a dedicated, if not large, readership for his prolific output.

His Facebook profile once had a list of “liked” books whose first two titles were “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Big Sleep,” a thumbnail distillation of his own oeuvre of highbrow plundering of lowbrow culture.

Mr. Nicholson was a verbal jokester, whether in ambitious fiction or in more prosaic writing. For the “About” page of his website, he annotated his own Wikipedia entry. In response to Wikipedia’s assertion that his work was “compared favorably” to that of Kingsley and Martin Amis, Will Self and Zadie Smith, Mr. Nicholson wrote, “I don’t recall anybody ever comparing me to Kingsley Amis, but I suppose they might have.”

One person who did compare him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 review of Mr. Nicholson’s best-known novel, “Bleeding London.”