The author of the cult classic novel The Dice Man, in which a bored psychiatrist travels to some very dark places when he lets “the dice decide” his options, has died at the age of 87.
George Powers Cockcroft, who published The Dice Man in 1971 under the pseudonym Luke Rhinehart, died on 6 November, his publishers confirmed to the Guardian.
Although reports of his demise appeared in the French media earlier this week, and his nephew posted on Facebook that “Luke Rhinehart is dead … This is real. I’m pretty sure”, the Guardian waited for official confirmation from his publisher Titan. Rhinehart previously announced his own death in 2012, emailing friends to tell them: “It is our pleasure to inform you that Luke Rhinehart is dead.” He was not, describing the letter as “a jeu d’esprit”.
“I was getting a little tired of Luke,” he told author Emmanuel Carrère in 2014. “I’m getting older, you know. I still love life: seeing what the weather’s like when I look out the window in the morning, doing the gardening, making love, going kayaking, but I am less interested in my career, and my career was basically Luke. I wrote that letter for [his wife] Ann to send it to my correspondents when I died. I kept it in a file for two years, and one day I decided to send it.”
The author of 11 books, most recently Invasion, a novel in which furry aliens come to Earth to have fun, Rhinehart remains best known for The Dice Man. Published in 1971, it was seemingly an autobiography, telling of a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who decides to roll a dice each time he has to make a decision.
“If it lands on a number from two to six, I’ll do what I would have done anyway: bring the dirty glasses back to the kitchen, brush my teeth, take a double aspirin, go to bed beside my sleeping wife, and maybe masturbate discreetly thinking of Arlene. But if I roll a one, I’ll do what I really want to do: I know Arlene’s at home alone tonight, so I’ll go across the hall, knock on her door and sleep with her.”
Sparking a wave of followers – Richard Branson admitted to being a disciple, with the dice once telling him “that for all that day I had to scream loudly on the hour every hour for 12 hours” – it has sold more than 2m copies around the world.
Cockcroft, who lived on a farmhouse in upstate New York, said that he started using dice himself in college, to decide what to do with his friends on a Saturday night. The dice also told him to first ask the woman who would become his wife of 64-years, Ann, on a date. He went on to become an English teacher, taking a job at the American school in Mallorca, where he started writing The Dice Man.
In 2017, he showed the Guardian an extract from his diary at the time. “I must finish the Dice Man novel. I know that if I open the novel and begin to read it, I, and it, will live, and my desire to work on it and complete it will bloom again,” he wrote in 1969. “I am the Dice Man in a way I am no one else. It is the idea which my life has created. I am not good for a second one. I am not a professional writer. I am without talent in any way. But the theory of the dice man, the ironic spirit of his life, grows as naturally in my rocky soil as do boulders here along the rocky coast of Mallorca.”
Cockcroft’s editor at Titan, Cath Trechman said she was “so sad”: “He was delightful to work with: funny, kind and enthusiastic about everything. Working on Invasion was a wonderful, mad adventure. I feel lucky to have known him.”
Writing on Facebook, his nephew Eric Cockcroft described him as “a wonderful man and an incredible writer”. “I’m gonna miss him … this post is probably gonna totally suck, and being bad with emotions, I don’t care. Luckily, most people reading this have decided that it’s some perverse joke and stopped reading,” he wrote. “His enthusiasm for an exciting and fun life was contagious, and we were all blessed to have known him. The world is lucky to have his writings to keep that spirit of his alive. So, it’s real, George Powers Cockcroft is dead.”