Frank Tallis

Frank Tallis (born 1 September 1958) is an English author and clinical psychologist, whose area of expertise is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He has written 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. The Liebermann novels have been adapted by Stephen Thompson into the BBC TV series Vienna Blood, which first aired in 2019.

Early life Frank Tallis was born Francesco de Nato Napolitano in Stoke Newington in northeast London and grew up in Tottenham, a district characterised by ethnic diversity and social tensions, where he attended one of the former secondary modern schools, and describes his background as "100% Southern Italian". After he left school he initially lived an unsteady life, teaching piano and playing in a rock band. Then he married, and lived in the country for a while with his wife and their child.

Psychologist After he and his wife divorced 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 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.