George Cockcroft, author who as ‘Luke Rhinehart’ found fame with his book The Dice Man – obituary

George Cockcroft, who has died aged 87, was the real author of The Dice Man, a 1971 “memoir” claiming to have been written by a Luke Rhinehart, which in the years since its publication has become a cult classic, selling more than two million copies in 23 languages, although it earned itself a ban in several countries.

The book was an account of an American psychiatrist who, bored with life, decides to break free of social and moral constraints by allowing his life to be governed by the chance roll of the dice, a technique that enables him to do things he wishes to but would normally not dare to do, beginning with raping the wife of a colleague (as it turns out she is a willing victim).

As time goes on, his life takes an even darker turn as the random throw of the dice liberates him from his sense of self and any sense of personal responsibility. Eventually he writes “murder” on his list of options, and when the dice orders him to do it, he draws up a list of six potential victims. There follows an extended sequence describing the brutal murder of a former patient.

By this time his strange behaviour has destroyed his marriage, his career and his reputation, but the rule of the dice is all. At a time when gurus peddling all sorts of bizarre lifestyles and therapies are attracting the credulous in their droves (the book was published the year Dr Timothy Leary fled the US for Switzerland, and of the trial for murder of Charles Manson and members of his “Manson family” cult), he establishes the “Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments” – churches of a new faith disguised as clinics.

When some patients die, escape or go mad, the centres cause a major public scandal – schools of chaos posing a serious a threat to civilisation according to the press. The guru’s fate, however, remains shrouded in mystery.

Readers were left unsure how much of The Dice Man was fiction and how much, if any, was autobiography. Both the protagonist and the alleged author were called Luke Rhinehart; both were described as psychiatrists, and they shared a birthday.

The Dice Man concept began to attract adherents. The tycoon Richard Branson admitted to being a disciple. Communities of followers of the dice were said to have established themselves all over the world and the technique was said to be popular at wife-swapping parties. Websites carried stories of people ruining their lives by setting extreme options such as stabbing a stranger at random.

“Luke Rhinehart” went on to write several more works of fiction, including The Book of the Die (2000), a “handbook of dice living”, an epilogue to which tantalised followers with the information that one day, when Rhinehart was being chased by the FBI, he had leapt off a cliff and caught hold of a vine – below him half a dozen policemen with machine guns, above him two mice gnawing at the vine, but in front of him a cluster of strawberries. “‘Ah,’ he said. ‘A new option’.”

In 1999, Diceworld, a Channel 4 documentary, featured the British journalist Ben Marshall who, in the 1990s, took on an assignment to follow Rhinehart’s example for three months. Among other things, the dice required him to sample heroin and to cruise for gay men in Santa Monica. Marshall explained that he had stopped the experiment before he went mad.

The documentary also featured “Luke Rhinehart”, a gaunt “reclusive enigma” in a stetson telling viewers in a low, insinuating voice: “You lead a dull life, a life of slavery, a life that doesn’t satisfy you, but there’s a way to get out of it. This way is the dice. Let yourself go, submit yourself to it, and you’ll see, your life will change, you’ll become someone you can’t even imagine.”

Towards the end of the documentary, Rhinehart was revealed to be the persona of 66-year-old George Cockcroft, who in an interview with The Scotsman from his home in New York State, admitted that he was not in the least bit like his amoral alter ego: “It’s all part of The Dice Man mythology, and I dare say it’s helped sell me a few more copies of the book.”

Subsequently, in an article in the French magazine XXI, published in English last year in an essay collection, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, who had become a fan of the dice aged 16 “to give me the self-confidence I lacked with girls”, described how he, too, had gone in search of “Rhinehart” and discovered Cockcroft, a modest English lecturer living “in an old farmhouse with a yard that slopes down to a duck pond”, happily married to the same wife for 53 years and a devoted father of three, one with special needs whom he and his wife cared for at home.

George Powers Cockcroft was born on November 15 1932 in Albany, New York, where his father was an electrical engineer. At Cornell University he began studying Psychology, but switched to English Literature and went on to study at Columbia University, where he took an MA and PhD in American literature.

While working night shifts as an intern in a Long Island hospital he started working on a novel about a young man who has been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital because he thinks he is Jesus. Among the hospital staff is a doctor called Luke Rhinehart, who practises dice therapy.

The idea was one which Cockcroft had picked up in college, where he and friends threw dice to decide what they were going to do on Saturday nights. The dice also told him to ask an attractive nurse he had met at the hospital whether she would like a game of tennis. The nurse became his wife, Ann, with whom he had three sons.

Cockroft became an English teacher, and in the mid-1960s got a job at the American school in Majorca, where, influenced by contemporary counterculture, he began to read books all based to a greater or lesser extent on the idea that to be free, human beings need to liberate themselves from social conditioning.

It struck him that the innocent dice games he had played at college might be used to do just that, and he embarked on his most famous novel, adopting Luke Rhinehart as his nom de plume.

The book and film rights from The Dice Man allowed Cockcroft to retire from teaching and become a full-time writer. He and his family spent a number of years travelling and sailing before returning in the mid-1970s to the US, where they lived briefly in a Sufi commune, before moving to their large farmhouse in the foothills of the Berkshires in upstate New York.

Emmanuel Carrère described Cockcroft as “an adorable old man who is approaching the end of a sweet, comfortable life with his adorable wife, a man whose only departure from the norm was to have written this alarming book.”

In later life Cockcroft appears to have become somewhat bored with his alter ego, and in 2012 “Rhinehart” emailed 25 relatives and friends to tell them: “It is our pleasure to inform you that Luke Rhinehart is dead”. “I was getting a little tired of Luke,” he told Carrère. “I wrote that letter for Ann to send to my correspondents when I died. I kept it in a file for two years, and one day I decided to send it.”

He later described the email as a “jeu d’esprit”.

George Cockcroft, born November 15 1932, died November 6 2020