Gordon Williams obituary
Booker-shortlisted writer whose novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm was adapted into the controversial Sam Peckinpah film Straw DogsIn 2003, when the Guardian ran my admiring profile of the writer Gordon Williams, the piece was headed simply Gordon Who? It was a good question, for by the tail-end of his career Williams, who has died aged 83, was an elusive figure, wary of the publicity customarily associated with the literary life.
In his day, on the other hand, he was a versatile and prolific performer in a variety of high-profile genres. Not many Grub Street irregulars can boast, as he was able to do in the half-decade between 1966 and 1971, of having had one novel shortlisted for the Booker prize and another filmed by the Hollywood director Sam Peckinpah while carrying out ghostwriting assignments for an England football captain.
Bobby Moore was one of a number of football stars for whom Williams either served as amanuensis or joined in fully fledged collaborations. The most notable of these was the future England manager Terry Venables (“A very serious, introverted guy,” Williams remembered. “The cheeky cockney chappie was a total act”) with whom he co-authored the much-praised football novel They Used to Play on Grass (1972) and the Hazell detective series, later successfully transferred to TV. Their association kept up until Venables’ days in charge of Barcelona.
Like many a postwar British writer, Williams’s origins lay in provincial journalism. The son of William, a police constable, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Cameron), he was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and educated there at the John Neilson Institution. Williams led what was initially a peripatetic existence, both in Scotland and along the south coast of England, and claimed that by the age of 23 he had lived at 28 separate addresses. Salvation came in the offer of a feature writer’s job on the Daily Mail-owned Weekend magazine, with a brief to commission articles by well-known sports personalities.
Within a year, he was operating on the fringes of the 1966 England World Cup squad, finessing Moore’s newspaper columns, ghostwriting two of his official autobiographies and pondering the substantial differences between the England captain’s private and public personae. With his fellow professionals, Williams recalled, the outwardly diffident Moore was “raucous Bobby – get your trousers down, on the table dancing”.
Meanwhile, Williams had more serious aims in view. His first novel, The Last Day of Lincoln Charles, appeared in 1965, and for the next 10 years, he published fiction at an astonishing rate of knots, roving across genres and alternating deeply felt “literary” novels with what he frankly acknowledged to be pot-boilers.
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (1969), in which an American academic and his family are menaced by a gang of West Country vigilantes pursuing the escaped child-killer hiding in their attic, was written in a bare nine days. Film rights were secured by the American TV and film executive David Susskind, and the job of directing eventually fell to the famously gore-fixated Peckinpah (“the man was sick”, Williams pronounced). With Dustin Hoffman on board as the male lead, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm metamorphosed into the highly controversial Straw Dogs (1971), long refused a video certificate by the British Board of Film Censors for the rape scene – absent from the book – involving Hoffman’s co-star Susan George.
By this stage Williams was making what, for the time, was a great deal of money. His total receipts for an earlier novel, The Man Who Had Power Over Women (1967), the film rights for which went to Paramount, were put at £27,000. He was also attracting serious critical attention – Melvyn Bragg, one of several early admirers, praised the “tremendously fierce truthfulness” of his fiction – and enjoying an increasingly bibulous social life.
Bragg, who became a friend, remembered an epochal early 1970s London pub crawl that began at Blackfriars Bridge and ground to a halt several hours later at the Williams home in Notting Hill. The excursion ended with both men being upbraided by Williams’s wife, Claerwen. Claerwen (nee Jones), whom he had married in 1964, was herself a published novelist in the 1970s and 1980s and later became a psychotherapist.
By this stage, Williams was growing tired of novel-writing, claiming that his gregarious nature revolted against the solitary disciplines of the desk. There were some late-1970s sci-fi experiments, but by the early 1980s he had reinvented himself as a screenwriter, turning down the chance to work on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl (1981) but scripting the 1985 documentary 64 Day Hero, in which he also starred, as the sleuth researching the life and tragic death of the black boxer and former world middleweight champion Randolph Turpin, and Innocent Victim, a 1989 adaptation of the Ruth Rendell novel The Tree of Hands.
Any estimate of Williams’s work is always likely to be complicated by the variety of styles and genres in which he wrote, but most of his admirers would probably settle on From Scenes Like These (1969) as the book which most perfectly showcased his gifts. Set on a bleak mid-1950s Ayrshire farm, and featuring a teenage boy who yearns to be a professional footballer before settling for the traditional male pursuits of drink and women, it was included on the first Booker shortlist, alongside Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark (the prize was eventually won by PH Newby’s Something to Answer For) and has strong claims to be regarded as one of the great lost classics of postwar British fiction.
Williams is survived by Claerwen, his daughters, Harriet and Jessica, and son, Sam, and three grandchildren.
Gordon McLean Williams, writer, born 20 June 1934; died 20 August 2017
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