Gordon Williams
Scottish Booker-shortlisted novelist who wrote the story that inspired Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs
GORDON WILLIAMS, who has died aged 83, was the first of a handful of Scots ever to make the Booker shortlist, created (with Terry Venables) the 1970s detective series Hazell, and wrote the novel that became Sam Peckinpah’s shocker Straw Dogs (1971).
But by the mid-1980s a writer praised for his “tremendously fierce truthfulness” seemed to have disappeared off the literary map, the subject only of “Where is he now?” pieces in the press.
When he earned a nomination for From Scenes Like These in the inaugural Booker awards in 1969, Williams, then 35, seemed to have the world at his feet. The film rights to his previous novel, The Man Who Had Power Over Women (1967), the story of a talent agent and his complex love life, had been sold to Paramount for a then massive £27,000 (the film was released in 1970 starring Rod Taylor), and his The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (1969) would soon be snapped up by Peckinpah.
From Scenes Like These, a bleak but by no means humourless coming-ofage novel about a young man growing up in rural west Scotland, was up against stiff competition from the likes of Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. The prize was eventually won by PH Newby’s Something to Answer For, though Williams’s own memories of the award, recalled in an interview in 2012, may go some way towards explaining why he suffered critical neglect in his later years.
He had, he explained, been expecting to win: “My wife and I had already spent the 5,000 quid on a new bathroom. When my name wasn’t read out I was bloody pissed off.” Literary awards, he decided, were for “the would-be dairy queens of Kentucky, not writers”.
When he had moved to England some years earlier, his father, a Glasgow police constable, had given him “two blue police shirts, plus collars, two pound notes and a stern warning about drink” – advice he proceeded to ignore, until eventually giving up alcohol in 1979.
In an article in the Glasgow Herald in 1982, he observed that the “little quirks” of the Scottish character, “namely obsessiveness, megalomania, suicidal guilt, paranoia, cowardice when sober, and loudmouth hostility in drink, a fetish for minutiae and unquestioning drudgery as a defence against headaches from using our brains, and a belief that conversation is a series of interruptions, are exactly those required for novels”. Indeed, his fondness for the bottle inspired some of his best prose.
The hilarious Walk – Don’t Walk (1972) was prompted by his first US book tour. He would recall how, in St Louis, his minder – struggling to keep him sober for breakfast television – decided not to let on that Judy Garland had requested a nightcap with “the crazy Scottish author”; the minder was never forgiven. In Big Morning Blues (1974), he evoked the sleazy subculture of Soho (where he worked in the 1960s) from the
perspective of a 29-year-old Glaswegian trying to eke out a living as a dodgy music agent and writer of pornography, who spends much of his time hustling free drinks in various seedy hostelries.
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (1969), for which Williams became best known, was an early example of what became known as the “home invasion” sub-genre, about a prissy American academic and his family who rent a Devon farm only to find themselves under attack from local vigilantes after sheltering a convicted child killer. Williams had dashed off the book in nine days as a £300 “hit-andrun” job. However, his agent, George Greenfield, spotted its Hollywood potential.
Adapted by Sam Peckinpah as Straw Dogs, the film, starring Dustin
Hoffman and Susan George, caused an outcry with its repulsive violence and a notorious rape scene – not contained in the book – which led one commentator to dub it “a running sewer disgorging human waste”.
Williams, who found himself expected to justify the film, was outraged by what Peckinpah had done to his story, describing the director as “sick” and the film as “neo-nazi crap”. In retaliation, Peckinpah likened reading Williams’s book to “drowning in vomit” and moved his credit to the very end of the film. “I’m sitting there with my wife, this is my big moment, the Hollywood film, the big time,” Williams recalled, “and there was my name, and every single person in the cinema had their backs to the screen, rushing to the exit.”
Williams had developed a sideline ghostwriting newspaper columns and autobiographies for football stars, and as he got “bored” with the literary world, he returned to football, teaming up with Terry Venables to write a sci-fi novel, They Used to Play on Grass (1971). They also collaborated on a series of novels, under the pen name PB Yuill, about a hard-boiled private detective called Hazell, a Cockney Philip Marlowe, which was turned into a hit television series starring Nicholas Ball.
Williams returned to sci-fi with The Micronauts (1977) and two sequels, in which scientists respond to growing famine by cloning miniature humans.
He also wrote paperbacks under the name Jack
Lang, “for £300 a time”, and published a historical novel, Pomeroy (1982).
He turned down Bill Forsyth’s approach to write the screenplay for
Gregory’s Girl (1981), but scripted the 1985 documentary 64 Day Hero, about the life and death of the black middleweight boxing champion Randolph Turpin, and Innocent Victim, a 1989 film adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s The Tree of Hands. He also wrote the book of Ridley Scott’s film The Duellists. Partly as a result of such diffusion, however, Williams became marginalised – so much so that one newspaper even reported that he was dead.
Gordon Mclean Williams was born on June 20 1934 in Paisley and grew up on the Ferguslie Park estate which, he would recall, “was voted the worst slum in Britain for violence, drunkenness, incest, you name it.” A great-uncle, a Plymouth Brother who had published a book – “about his missionary work in Venezuela, saving pagan Indians from Rome” – encouraged him to write, and after leaving Paisley’s John Neilson Institution, Williams began his career as a £2-a-week cub reporter on the Johnstone Advertiser before doing his National Service in the RAF.
Back in Scotland, he wrote to 20 bigger Scottish papers, but received no replies, so he decided to move south. He became a reporter on the Poole Herald, an experience that provided the basis for The Upper Pleasure Garden (1970), about a foot-in-the-door journalist who fabricates sensational stories, a work described by one profile-writer as “the greatest novel about newspaper hackdom, ever”.
During his time on the paper, he had a scoop during coverage of the case of Albert Goozee, who had murdered his lover, the wife of his one-legged Parkstone landlord, and her daughter, at a New Forest picnic spot. Chasing the story when it broke in 1956, Williams outsmarted rival hacks waiting outside the home of a woman who had photographs of the victims by clambering over her back wall to collect the pictures.
He started writing a book based on his experiences in the RAF – it became The Camp (1966) – when he was in Poole, and moved to London to work on the South London Advertiser followed by stints as a sub-editor at the Boy’s Own Paper in Fleet Street, at John Bull magazine, on Men Only and then as a features writer on the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine. He was given a brief to commission pieces from soccer stars, but after an interview with the clarinettist Acker Bilk led to a commission to ghostwrite his autobiography, he decided it was easier to write them himself.
He then became assistant editor of the arts magazine Scene, where his ghostwriting activities continued in parallel with his career as a novelist, his clients including Bobby Moore and Tommy Docherty.
In 1998, when the Guardian included him in a piece about neglected writers, along with the question “Where is he now?”, Williams recalled that the paper had asked the same question five years earlier while he was actually doing research in its newsroom: “I’d even been out for a drink with the arts editor who wrote the piece.”
“I’m just glad to find out I’m still alive,” he went on. “It’s a relief.”
In 1964 he married Claerwen Jones, who published several books in the 1970s and 1980s under the pseudonyms Christabel Browne and Maud Lang. She survives him with their two daughters and a son.
Gordon Williams, born June 20 1934, died August 20 2017