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Just two weeks after resigning his column at the back of MacUser, Tony Tyler has died. He was diagnosed with cancer 11 days ago.

His history with the magazine stretched back 21 years, all the way to the second issue, when he pitched an article on spec, was accepted, and started a career of over two decades that made him the magazine’s longest-standing contributor.

I didn’t realise, until I read the obituaries, quite what an extraordinary life he had. I knew that he’d given Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons their first jobs, and I knew of his time at the NME and in the army, where he was apparently the last surviving victim of a musket wound.

I didn’t know the army had had to build him a special bed to sleep in (he was very tall), and that it followed him around from posting to posting. Nor that he’d been a piano salesman in San Francisco, played cards with the Beatles, had a number 1 hit in Italy, sold a guitar now valued at £2m, and more or less lived off the royalties of his 700-page opus The Tolkien Companion.

His only regret was that he would die before the new Bond film was released in two weeks’ time, as he was the godfather of new Bond, Daniel Craig.

But, as his obituary in the Guardian explains, he wasn’t afraid of death.

His last words, addressed to his 86-year-old mother-in-law, were: “I just want you to know, for when it’s your turn, that this [dying] isn’t actually so bad.”

It is clear, from the number of emails we have received at the office, how much he was loved by those who had read his work over the years. And how very difficult he will be to replace.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.