Frank Tallis


Frank Tallis is an author and clinical psychologist, whose area of expertise is obsessive-compulsive disorder. He has authored crime novels, including the collection of novels known as the Liebermann Papers, for which he has received several awards, is an essayist, and — under the name of F.R. Tallis — has written horror fiction. A crime fiction adaptation by Stephen Thompson was televised in 2019 as Vienna Blood.

Life

Frank Tallis grew up in Tottenham, a north London district characterised by ethnic diversity and social tensions, where he attended one of the former secondary modern schools. Upon graduation he initially lived an unsteady life, teaching piano and playing in a rock band, then married and lived in the country for a while with his wife and child. After a divorce, he earned a doctorate in psychology and worked for the British National Health Service for a long time, taught clinical psychology and neuroscience at King's College London and treated private patients. Tallis has been a full-time writer since the late 2000s and lives in London.
Tallis has published more than 30 articles in psychology and psychiatry journals. He has written four popular science books on psychology, drawing on anonymized case studies from his therapeutic practice, including The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations, in which he deals with the phenomenon of obsessive love.
Since 2005, Tallis has been writing crime novels, published under the rubric of the Liebermann Papers and set in Vienna around the beginning of the 20th century. The two main characters are Vienna police inspector Oskar Reinhardt and his friend and adviser, psychiatrist Max Liebermann, a student of Sigmund Freud and a regular guest at Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19, now the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.

Non-fiction

Max Liebermann mysteries

Writing as F.R. Tallis