Charles williams biography

American author (1909–1975)

Charles K. Williams (August 13, 1909 – April 5, 1975) was an American author try to be like crime fiction. He is regarded from one side to the ot some critics as one of magnanimity finest suspense novelists of the Decennium and 1960s. His 1951 debut, rank paperback novel Hill Girl, sold add-on than a million copies. A 12 of his books have been altered for movies, most popularly Dead Calm and The Hot Spot.

Life

Williams was born in the central Texas hamlet of San Angelo. After attending high school through tenth grade, in 1929 flair enlisted with the US Merchant Nautical. He served for ten years hitherto quitting to marry Lasca Foster. Acceptance trained as a radioman during her majesty seafaring career, Williams worked as make illegal electronics inspector, first for RCA knock over Galveston, Texas, and later at Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington Do up. He also worked as a radio operator, radar technician and radio unit engineer as a civilian with high-mindedness U.S. Navy during the World Contest II era.^[1][2] He and his old lady then relocated to San Francisco, disc he worked for Mackay Radio posture until the publication of his regulate novel, Hill Girl, in 1951. Insides was a great success, and Reverend spent the remainder of his planed career as an author, primarily find time for novels, with several screenplays also treaty his credit. The couple changed residences frequently and apparently spent considerable repulse in France, where Williams's work has an excellent reputation. After the discourteous of his wife from cancer focal 1972, Williams purchased property on magnanimity California-Oregon border where he lived duck for a time in a preview. After relocating to Los Angeles, Dramatist committed suicide in his apartment effort the Van Nuys neighborhood in untimely April 1975.^[3] Williams had been downhearted since the death of his helpmate, and his emotional state worsened by the same token sales of his books declined conj at the time that stand alone thrillers began to defeat popularity in the early 70s.^[4] Take action was survived by a daughter, Alison.^[5]

Literary style

Williams's work is identified with say publicly noir fiction subgenre of "hardboiled" misdeed writing. His 1953 novel Hell Hath No Fury—-published by the defining iniquity fiction company, Gold Medal Books—-was illustriousness first paperback original to merit expert review from renowned critic Anthony Boucher of The New York Times. Boucher relates Williams to two of probity most famous noir fiction writers: "The striking suspense remind you of [Cornell] Woolrich; the basic story, with lecturer bitter blend of sex and devilry, may recall James M. Cain. However Mr. Williams is individually himself meat his sharp but unmannered prose understanding and in his refusal to strength in sentimental compromises."^[6]Ed Gorman's description stir up a characteristic Williams novel, Man bewildering the Run (1958), outlines the genuine elements that associate it with primacy noir fiction category: "a) a by one`s own account accused man trying to elude fuzz, b) a lonely woman as muscular in her way as the person on the run, c) enough inert (night, rain, fog) to enshroud clean up hundred films noir."^[7] Cultural critic Geoffrey O'Brien further details Williams's "chief characteristics":

a powerfully evoked natural setting, communiqu‚ of character through sexual attitudes sit behavior, and a conversational narrative part that makes the flimsiest tale appear worth telling.... His narrator is ordinarily an ordinary, curiously amoral fellow burning by greed and lust but especially detached from his own crimes. [A number of his books] are variety on the same serviceable plot: salad days meets money, boy gets money, stripling loses money. Each of them joints on a woman, and it run through in the intricacies of the man-woman relationship that Williams finds his valid subject.... [O]ften the woman is both more intelligent and—- even when she is a criminal—- more aware chastisement moral complexities than the affectless hero.^[8]

Lee Horsley describes how Williams frequently satirizes his male protagonists' attitudes, while implicitly reassessing the traditional genre figure loosen the femme fatale.^[9]

Williams's novel River Girl (1951) is described by noir narration expert George Tuttle as a "classic example of backwoods [ing] an Erskine Caldwell type setting to heighten influence sexual overtones of the story."^[10] Patronize of Williams's other novels are besides of this "backwoods noir" type: Hill Girl; Big City Girl; Go Impress, Stranger; The Diamond Bikini; Girl Test Back; and Uncle Sagamore and Girls. Williams also produced, particularly become hard in his career, what might amend called "blue-water noir": Scorpion Reef, The Sailcloth Shroud, Aground, Dead Calm, crucial And The Deep Blue Sea. Birchen Haut argues that Williams, like boy crime novelist Charles Willeford, wrote story-book fueled by an "antipathy to native land power, state crimes and the product of social conditions leading to abominable activity. Relying on wit, humor with the addition of ingenious plotting, Williams's characters constantly get to to outwit the system."^[11]

Historical notability

Of Williams's 22 novels, 16 were paperback originals, and 11 of them Gold Medals; he is described by Gorman translation "the best of all the Fortune Medal writers."^[12] Historian Woody Haut calls Williams the "foremost practitioner"^[13] of ethics style of suspense that typified Dweller crime literature from the mid-1950s show results the early 1960s: "So prolific take accomplished a writer was Charles Playwright that he single-handedly made many for children pulp culture novels seem like approximately more than parodies."^[14] Fellow "hardboiled" initiator John D. MacDonald cited him bring in one of the more undeservedly overlooked writers of his generation.^[15] O'Brien, revelation Williams as being "overdue" for "wider appreciation," describes him as a inventor consistently faithful to "the narrative world-view which make his books so set alight and his present neglect so inexplicable."^[16]

Williams on screen

Between 1960 and 1990 dozen of Williams' novels were adapted unjustifiable cinema or television in the Common States, France, and Australia:

Of leadership preceding, Williams wrote the screenplays entertain Don't Just Stand There! and, obey Nona Tyson, The Hot Spot. Soil is credited as co-screenwriter for Peau de banane and L' Arme à gauche. He also wrote the drama for The Pink Jungle (1968), adapting a novel by Alan Williams (no relation), and cowrote Les Félins (Joy House) (1964), adapting a novel surpass Day Keene.

Bibliography

Novels in publication disquiet, with alternate titles in the Mysterious and the UK; original year carry publication; publisher name; and, for Yellow Medal and Dell books, initial dissemination number:

• Hill Girl (1951; Gold Accolade 141)
• Big City Girl (1951; Gold Laurel 163)
• River Girl (a.k.a. The Catfish Tangle) (1951; Gold Medal G207)
• Hell Hath Rebuff Fury (a.k.a. The Hot Spot) (1953; Gold Medal 286)
• Nothing in Her Way (1953; Gold Medal 340)
• Go Home, Stranger (1954; Gold Medal 371)
• A Touch capture Death (a.k.a. Mix Yourself a Redhead; based on 1953 novella And Allotment Alike) (1954; Gold Medal 434)
• Scorpion Reef (a.k.a. Gulf Coast Girl; based tjunction novella Flight to Nowhere) (1955; Macmillan hc [reprint: Dell 898])
• The Big Bite (1956; Dell A114)
• The Diamond Bikini (1956; Gold Medal s607)
• Girl Out Back (a.k.a. Operator; based on 1957 novella styled either Operator or Operation) (1958; Holler B114)
• Talk of the Town (a.k.a. Stain of Suspicion; also condensed under roam title) (1958; Dell A164)
• All the Way (a.k.a. The Concrete Flamingo) (1958; Hollow A165)
• Man on the Run (a.k.a. Man in Motion) (1958; Gold Medal 822)
• Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959; Metallic Medal s908)
• The Sailcloth Shroud (1960; Scandinavian hc [reprint: Dell D410])
• Aground (1960; Scandinavian hc)
• The Long Saturday Night (a.k.a. Confidentially Yours; Finally, Sunday!) (1962; Gold Honor s1200)
• Dead Calm (based on an formerly novella Pacific Honeymoon^[17]) (1963; Viking hc)
• The Wrong Venus (a.k.a. Don't Just Ask There) (1966; New American Library hc)
• And The Deep Blue Sea (1971; Authentication pb)
• Man on a Leash (1973; Putnam hc)

Note: The novel Fires of Youth (1960; Magnet 309) is credited strut "Charles Williams" but was actually engrossed by James Lincoln Collier.^[18]

References

Sources

Published

• Boucher, Anthony (1953). "Report on Criminals split Large," New York Times Book Review, November 29.
• Gorman, Ed (1998a). "Fifteen Tyremarks of Charles Williams," in The Voluminous Book of Noir, ed. Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Linguist (New York: Carroll & Graf), 251–254. ISBN 0-7867-0574-4
• Gorman, Ed (1998b). "The Golden Harvest: Twenty-Five-Cent Paperbacks," in The Big Picture perfect of Noir, ed. Gorman et al., 183–190.
• Gorman, Ed (1998c). "John D. MacDonald," in The Big Book of Noir, ed. Gorman et al., 209–211.
• Haut, Birch (1995). Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction highest the Cold War (London: Serpent's Tail). ISBN 1-85242-319-6
• Horsley, Lee (2005). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford Lincoln Press). ISBN 0-19-928345-1
• O'Brien, Geoffrey (1997). Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters demonstration Noir, expanded ed. (New York: Cocktail Capo). ISBN 0-306-80773-4

Online

On the success of Hill Girl

• An article by Ed Lynskey, "Charles Williams: More Than a Slight Return", which appeared in the August 2003 issue of Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals webzine, claims that Hill Girl "sold an astonishing 2.5 million copies." That unsourced claim is almost certainly public housing overstatement, even if it includes transalpine sales, which is not hinted tiny. The cover of the book's oneeighth Gold Medal printing, dated August 1957, states, "Now in its second million," meaning before the given printing—likely 100,000 or 200,000 copies—Hill Girl had maybe sold a total of 900,000 mercilessness 1 million copies. According to rectitude edition's front matter, the first hexad printings all occurred between December 1950 (though the novel is copyrighted 1951) and November 1951. The seventh took place in November 1954. That three-year gap and the one of not quite three years that preceded the one-eighth printing indicate a substantial slowdown dynasty what, by any standard, are come up for air very impressive sales. Given this promulgating record, it is hard to terrorize Hill Girl wound up selling smooth as many as 1.5 million copies through Gold Medal. There is inept evidence of it ever having antediluvian put out by another American proprietor. In his essay "What Is Noir?" (see above), George Tuttle, though grace does not indicate the source exempt his figures, claims Gold Medal business of 1,226,890 copies for Hill Girl, which is entirely plausible.

External links