Reg Gadney
Novelist, screenwriter and painter whose books ranged from ‘seedy thrillers’ to historical fiction
REG GADNEY, who has died aged 77, was an academic, novelist and screenwriter, and latterly gained a reputation as a portrait painter; he was also probably the best-fed man in England, as the husband and usual dining companion of Fay Maschler, the doyenne of British restaurant critics.
Tall (he had been an officer in the Coldstream Guards) and amiable, with a touch of gravel in his voice, Gadney’s bearing and bonhomie reflected his generosity of affection, and curiosity about other people.
He was working as a tutor at the Royal College of Art, lecturing on “Art and the Popular Imagination”, when he began to fulfil a long-held ambition to write “seedy thrillers”. He was already a respected reviewer of crime fiction for the London Magazine and had entered into correspondence with writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Daphne du Maurier, both of whom encouraged his early efforts at fiction.
His first book, Drawn Blanc (1970), featured a Czech dissident forced to work for the British secret service in London, and had surreal elements that earned it comparisons with Kafka. It was followed by Somewhere in England (1971), about the hunt for a Nazi war criminal, anticipating Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File by a year.
Four more thrillers followed in the 1970s, showcasing Gadney’s ability to evoke with relish the less genteel parts of London and other European cities. His books were particularly well received in America – he was called “a master of tightly packed prose and fast-moving narrative” by The New York Times – but were neglected in Britain.
After a long break from writing novels, in the 1990s he created a new character, Alan Rosslyn, an investigator for HM Customs & Excise, who appears in four books. Gadney described him as “dull but a very good listener, which makes him a successful seducer of women”. The first of these, Just When We Are Safest (1995), was tightly plotted, full of credible detail about the rivalries between the intelligence services, and sold well. It also contained the sort of tease that delighted his friends – a character who shares his surname and first initial with a well-known food writer.
In the meantime he had become much in demand as a television screenwriter, starting with the BBC’S four-parter, Forgive Our Foolish Ways (1980). Kennedy (1983), a seven-part miniseries starring Martin Sheen as JFK, won the Bafta for best drama series; he subsequently adapted it into a book. Gadney also did much-admired television adaptations of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1982), and Minette Walters’s thriller The Sculptress (1996), in which Pauline Quirke donned a fat suit for a memorable turn as an elephantine psychopath.
He wrote Goldeneye (1989), an excellent television biopic of Ian Fleming that starred Charles Dance; he accompanied the crew on location in Jamaica, and played a cameo role as James Bond, the ornithologist who inspired the name of Fleming’s character. His final major screenwriting project was the rather less distinguished television movie
The Murder of Princess Diana (2007). Gadney worked in a studio in the ground floor of his Georgian house in Fitzroy Square, one end of the room being devoted to writing and the other to painting. In 2014 an exhibition of his portraits was held at the Friary in London; among his subjects were the playwright Sir David Hare (a great friend with whom he regularly went to watch cricket matches) and his wife Nicole Farhi, and the actors Bill Nighy and Helena Bonham Carter.
On one occasion a friend visiting his studio observed that he did not recognise the distinguished-looking subject Gadney was working on; Gadney replied that he should hope not, as it was the current head of the MI6 counter-terrorism unit. He would gladly paint anybody who struck him as a promising subject. A portrait of a waitress at his local café adorns the cover of a recent reissue of Drawn Blanc.
Recently, as RJ Gadney, he had started to publish historical fiction. His final novel, Albert Einstein Speaking, about the great scientist’s friendship with a New Jersey schoolgirl, was published recently; it showed how Einstein’s life and career were both formed by European anti-semitism. Ian Mcewan described it as “a strange and luminous fiction, a literary gem beautifully and cunningly poised between historical truth and the warmly imagined.” It is also a paean to the (non-religious) Jewish values represented by the original Zionists. On her deathbed in 1983, Gadney’s mother had told him – to his delight – that she was Jewish.
Reginald Bernard John Gadney was born at Cross Hills, North Yorkshire, on January 20 1941, the son of Bernard Gadney, whose 2000 obituary in this paper described him as the “England captain and scrum-half who began the move that led to Obolensky’s great try against the All Blacks in 1936”; he had a reputation as the only player in the world who could kill a man with his reverse pass. Reg’s mother was the beautiful Margaret Alice Mary “Kelly” (née Lilley), a watercolourist, whom Bernard had “stolen” from his schoolmate, David Niven.
By the time Reg was born his father had become headmaster of Malsis, the North Yorkshire prep school. “If you’re the headmaster’s son, you’re always in the wrong,” he said in later life, reasoning that that was why “I don’t like authority, and that informs everything I do”. In the 1980s he wrote
Drummonds, a well-received television serial about prep school life, with Richard Pasco as the headmaster.
He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Stowe, and in 1959 he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. “Reg was the most unlikely Coldstream officer,” recalled one of his comrades, Simon Parker Bowles. “He had a wonky eye, flat feet, and painted in his room. It was a breath of fresh air to meet someone who was so different from one’s preconceived ideas of what a Guards officer should be.” Gadney served in Libya and France, and was an instructor in winter warfare and Arctic survival in Norway before working for the diplomatic staff at the British embassy in Oslo.
Towards the end of his military career he muffed a changing-of-theguard parade in front of the Queen Mother and got into serious trouble; but was later told Her Majesty had remarked that it was terribly nice to see the ceremony done differently.
He went on to read English, Fine Art and Architecture at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he became editor of Granta, and then won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his subject was Kinetic Art.
Returning to Britain in 1969 he became deputy controller of the National Film Theatre, a job that he described as “manageress,” doing everything from dealing with the ice creams to disposing of the used condoms on the floor; the following year he took up a position as tutor at the Royal College of Art, eventually becoming senior tutor and then the youngest Pro-rector in the college’s history.
In 1976 he published Constable and his World, a well-received pictorial biography of the artist, which led to his striking up an acquaintanceship with Francis Bacon, a great admirer of Constable. He recalled one occasion on which he gave Bacon a lift and asked him to put on his seat belt, to which Bacon, well-known for his masochistic proclivities, replied, “only if you strap me in tight, tight, tight. Please do it tighter.”
His non-fiction included Cry Hungary (1986), an account of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
Gadney had a fine eye for modern art and was the first person to whom Chris Ofili sold a picture. When Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998, Gadney wrote to The Times rebuking Lord Hanson for suggesting that Turner would be spinning in his grave.
In the 1980s he went to a dinner party hosted by the Chinese gastronome Yan-kit So, and was seated next to Fay Maschler. He claimed to have fallen for her after one guest, an expert on Chinese vegetables, opined that it was hard to think of anything to do with the cucumber. “The momentary silence was ended by the glamorous woman to my left. ‘I can think of at least five things to do with one,’ she said sweetly.”
Although he claimed that he needed only to look at food to put on a stone, Gadney relished dining out with his wife six days a week. Readers of Maschler’s Evening Standard columns came to feel that they knew a great deal about the unnamed “companion” who was finally outed as “Reg” after 10 years or so of marriage.
Gadney’s first marriage, in 1966, was to Annette Kobak, a writer and broadcaster; the marriage was dissolved. In 1992 Gadney married Fay Maschler, and she survives him, along with two step-daughters and a stepson, and a son and daughter of his previous marriage.
Reg Gadney, born January 20 1941, died May 1 2018