{"id":814,"date":"2006-07-28T14:14:39","date_gmt":"2006-07-28T14:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dml360.wordpress.com\/2006\/07\/28\/28-july-2006\/"},"modified":"2006-07-28T14:14:39","modified_gmt":"2006-07-28T14:14:39","slug":"28-july-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"28 July 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dave Gemmell died in the early hours of this morning, four days before his 58th birthday, following a quadruple heart bypass last week (Monday, July 17). He had seemed to be making a good recovery, though when I spoke to him yesterday at his home he sounded exhausted.\u00a0 He was struggling to make 500 steps a day as required, and had to “plan ahead to go upstairs”. He had been home for only a couple of days.<\/p>\n

His wife Stella found him in his study this morning; it seemed he had been dead for some hours. There will be a post-mortem to find the cause of death, which is not yet known.\u00a0 Stella rang us at about 10.30am. It was a huge shock.<\/p>\n

Dave has been a close friend since the late 60s. When we met he was sports editor at the Acton Gazette, and I was a sub-editor. We went out for an omelette one lunchtime, and after that I frequently went round his flat, which was nearby, to play chess. After losing to him, I was rash enough to say I would never lose to him again. We played constantly until he did beat me, one day on the Broads. He would never play me again.<\/p>\n

We kept in touch when I left London to come back to Norfolk, and he eventually moved down to Hastings. We met intermittently. He rose high in the newspaper world until he reached a crisis when he thought he had cancer and wrote a book about it – a fantasy book, which turned out to be a best-seller called Legend. It was the first of well over 20 books in the heroic fantasy mould, and he was a wonderful writer in any genre – especially good at characterisation and the poignant twist. <\/p>\n

This brought him a certain amount of wealth, with which he was extremely generous to relatives and friends. He was a big man and a larger-than-life figure to whom you could listen for hours. He was a natural storyteller.<\/p>\n

Recently he remarried and moved to a beautiful house in Sussex which we visited on three or four occasions. He had not been really well for a long time and hoped for a rejuvenated life after his operation. I shall miss him hugely. So will many, many other people.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/entertainment\/5224868.stm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Gemmell died in the early hours of this morning, four days before his 58th birthday, following a quadruple heart bypass last week (Monday, July 17). He had seemed to be making a good recovery, though when I spoke to him yesterday at his home he sounded exhausted.\u00a0 He was struggling to make 500 steps … Continue reading 28 July 2006<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog360.back2sq1.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}