A novel obsession

It is not just the fact that the former Oxford University Press editor has spent 30 years working on his first novel, which is said to have landed him a record publishing deal.

Rather, it's the story of his battle with cancer and the onset of blindness which has made the completion of his epic Victorian murder mystery such a remarkable achievement.

Four years ago Michael was forced to take early retirement at the OUP, where he had worked as a senior commissioning editor, after contracting a rare form of cancer.

With his sight beginning to go as a result of his illness, he was prescribed a steroidal drug, one of the effects of which was to initiate a temporary burst of mental and physical energy.

This, combined with the realisation that his blindness might return if the treatment was not successful, spurred him to write the book that he had been contemplating through most of his adult life.

While during his years of health he had been unable to do more than begin a few chapters, gathering a random collection of notes and discarded drafts, in illness he was to develop into the most prolific and driven of writers.

Even on the night before a major operation to reduce the pressure caused by a tumour, he was scribbling page after page in his hospital bed.

"Previously I could start chapters but I felt I could not finish them and even if I finished them I felt they didn't work. I suppose it came down to fear that I wasn't really any good.

"Now I have got rid of that fear. I stopped worrying about what other people might think. There was nothing to hold me back and I realised it was now or never."

If he still needed reassurance that at 58 he had what it took, it has not been long in coming. From the moment publishers read the memorable opening sentence - "After killing the red haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper" - substantial offers began pouring in. A bidding war ran for a week before publisher John Murray secured Michael's novel entitled The Meaning of Night for £430,000.

"As an ex-publisher I had pretty realistic expectations about how well a first novel set in the mid-Victorian period and written by a 55-year-old balding white man would go down," he said. "But it seemed that the whole world had gone crazy. When the John Murray offer came through, my wife Dizzy and I just sat on the sofa and cried."

The book has now given him the means to cope with his acute medical problems alongside those of his wife. For in the midst of his battle with Haemangiopericytoma, an uncommon type of vascular tumour, Dizzy was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, having to undergo surgery and radiotherapy.

But through it all his novel gave him a remarkable focus and strength to cope with so much misfortune. "I realised that I was a writer," he told me over lunch at the Old Parsonage. "That was something I had never realised before. And a writer must write."

Michael contracted cancer in 1992, a decade before leaving the OUP. The first tumour appeared in his left nasal cavity, the second at the base of his spine and the third under the brain. He will tell you that his unlikely rescuer was the television presenter Carol Vordeman, who presented a television feature on Gamma Knife therapy, a new method of treating brain tumours.

Michael investigated this new highly-targeted radioactive treatment and was to benefit from it, with the technique eventually reducing his tumour by 50 per cent.

But then in February 2004, looking out of the window of his study in the Northamptonshire village of Denford, he first became aware that his eyesight was deteriorating. His first thoughts were about his wife, daughter Emily, two stepchildren and three grandchildren. Then there were thoughts of no longer being able to enjoy his books or write that great novel that he had started so many times. To reduce the pressure on his optic nerve and to prepare for surgery, he was prescribed the drug Dexamethsone.

His sight returned but something totally unexpected happened, which he described in a recent article. "Energy - fizzing, unstoppable mental energy - surged through me. I felt as if I was king of the world. I could do anything.

"The first thing I did was to drive my wife to distraction. I was argumentative, unrelentingly talkative and on a perpetually short fuse. Sleep was difficult."

Then one night he pulled out one of the dozen discarded fist chapters of his novel, read the first sentence and started rewriting, only this time with real purpose. "I read the first sentence and thought, 'Not bad'.

"Once I started I simply couldn't stop writing. It was as though a door had been opened through which ideas poured like an unblocked stream. The medication was giving me the energy and confidence to do what I'd desperately struggled to do for almost three decades."

While Michael emphasises the importance of the drugs, in many ways he was uniquely qualified to bring to life Victorian England in a novel. He had been obsessed with Victorian novels, first picking up David Copperfield and Great Expectations as a boy.

He had read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was president of the college's literary society, only his ambition to become a don was to be sidelined by a remarkable rock'n'roll adventure. After forming a band with fellow students, he was spotted by EMI. Working initially under the name Matthew Ellis, his debut album was hailed by Melody Maker as "one of the most successful in the field", while the second solo record (entitled Am I?), featuring the legendary guitarist Chris Spedding, was described in one review as being "right up there with David Bowie's Hunky Dory".

There were also singles, including the much played Avalon, a rock hymn to Glastonbury.

He later changed his professional name to Obie Clayton. But after two albums with DJM, Elton John's old record label, he left the music industry to become an editor with Thorson's Publishing Group, joining the OUP in 1989.

At Oxford he commissioned a wide range of titles including The Oxford Sherlock Holmes and major Oxford reference works including The Oxford companions to Military History, The Garden, The Renaissance and Theatre and Performance.

Michael also wrote his own book for the OUP on the scholarly ghost writer Montague Rhodes James and edited an illustrated edition of the influential Victorian writer of ghost fiction J.S Le Fanu.

d=3,3,1His novel draws on a violent brew of Victorian ghost stories and 19th century detective stories. "I rarely read anything published post 1930," he says, though admits to admiring Sarah Waters and George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels.

"I began to think about The Meaning of Night over 30 years ago, though its roots go further to my early love of The Arabian Nights. You could say it is a resolutely old-fashioned novel, not only because it tries to emulate some of the narrative qualities of mid-Victorian fiction, but also because of its simple aim of telling a good story as well as possible."

As the novel, based around an anti-hero, lost inheritance and ancient country house, grew and grew, he recognised its part in his fight against cancer. "With serious illness, you are faced with either finding ways to cope with it or going away and shooting yourself. People say I'm brave. But bravery doesn't come into it. What choice do I have if I want to get up in the morning?"

There is genuine delight at the novel's remarkable success, aided by an almost unprecedented publicity campaign for a first novel. It has been published in 21 different languages but he seemed to take equal satisfaction from the fact that he had found it on display as book of the month in the Oxford Waterstone's store. After our meeting he was heading to meet a party of German journalists at Burghley House, in Stamford, which inspired the family seat in his book.

He breaks into a wide grin, when I suggest, like others, that the story would lend itself to a two-part television drama or even film.

"I hope a television or film adoption will be forthcoming. Edward Glyver (the book's central character) must have a strong physical presence. Johnny Depp does a very good English accent."

He has already begun work on a sequel and hopes to complete a trilogy, taking the story right up to the early years of the 20th century.

Does he regret that so many of his ambitions are only being realised now that he is blind in his left eye and still fighting cancer?

"I know my tumour does not care about any of this," he said. "But I don't think it could have happened any other way. Without these awful circumstances, The Meaning of Night could not have been written."