Charles Williams(1909-1975)
- Writer
Charles Williams was born in San Angelo, Texas, and grew up there and
in New Mexico. He attended Brownsville High School in Texas through the
tenth grade. In the United States Merchant Marine, from 1929 to 1939,
he served as a radio operator. Williams joined the U.S. Navy during
World War II, and between 1939 and 1950 worked as an electronics
inspector, a wireless operator, a radar technician, and a radio service
engineer. In the course of these careers he lived in Peru, Arizona,
Florida, and Switzerland. Williams married Lasca Foster in 1939; they
had one daughter, Alison. His first novel, Hill Girl, was rejected by
several publishers before the Fawcett publishing company picked it up
in 1950 for their line of Gold Medal paperback originals. Williams had
beginner's luck; it sold, according to one source, 1,226,890 copies. He
went on to publish 21 more novels, gaining enough attention as a member
of the "Gold Medal" writers that he was hired to script a few films,
including his own The Wrong Venus, filmed as Don't Just Stand There (1968), and Hell Hath No
Fury, filmed as _Hot Spot, The (1990/I)_. Williams seems to have been familiar with the
saying, "God made the country, man made the city, and the Devil made
the small town." His hard-boiled thrillers are often set in the hot,
humid, mosquito- and snake-infested hamlets of the Gulf Coast and South
Florida in the 1950s and 1960s. His more famous later novels take place
on boats or ships on the open sea. He also wrote some very funny
comedies, including The Diamond Bikini (1956) and Uncle Sagamore and
His Girls (1959), in which a boy chronicles the shenanigans of his
scheming uncle. However, Williams's thrillers more usually featured
guys who think they can get rich quick when they are seduced by the
deceitful promises of beautiful and dangerous dames, or honest, likable
types who find themselves in deadly circumstances but are determined to
see justice done at last. Although fourteen of his novels were optioned
or adapted for film -- the most successful being Dead Calm (1989) -- he received
little critical attention in the U.S. However, his books were
enormously popular in France, where nearly all were either translated
or filmed. His wife Lasca died in the early 1970s of cancer, and
Charles went to live alone in a trailer on the border between
California and Oregon. The weather there depressed him; he was too in
love with sun and sea. His personal finances declined as the popularity
of hard-boiled thrillers began to wane. In 1975, he committed suicide.
Williams's reputation lives on, stronger than ever, among aficionados
of the hard-boiled crime novel, and even his battered paperbacks can
sell for $100 or more.
