The high seas of charles williams

by Ed Lynskey

One ongoing friendly debate hashed among fans of Charles Williams’ suspense books (20, plus three comedies) pits the author’s land novels against his seafaring titles as representative of his best writing. He was, of course, adept at handling either, sea or land, and at least one novel, Man on a Leash (1973), draws on both to propel the narrative.

The first smart move when researching Charles Williams is to distinguish this one from the British writer of religious thrillers (1886-1945). Born in San Angelo, Texas, on August 13, 1909, Williams, one of five brothers, grew up smack dab in the geographical middle of The Lone Star State. One brother, Ned, was also an author. San Angelo, population under 10,000, was a railroad tank town in Tom Green County. It has a colorful past.

Located at the nexus of the North, South, and Middle Concho Rivers, San Angelo was the town "over the river." Cattle, sheep, and oil were its big three industries. In 1912, the Texas legislature erected the State Tuberculosis Sanatorium there. In 1910-11, Mexican-Americans boycotted their inferior segregated schools in San Angelo.

Raised in such a backcountry milieu, it was only natural that Williams should use similar locales in his early novels. His debut novel Hill Girl, which sold 1,226,890 copies in 1951, is a backwoods romp. Subsequent novels, River Girl (1951) and Hell Hath No Fury (1953) are set in swamp country and small town, respectively. As early as 1955 with his eighth novel, Scorpion Reef, Williams began to adapt the high seas to his thrillers. Others followed: Aground (1960), The Sailcloth Shroud (1960), Dead Calm (1963), as well as And the Deep Blue Sea (1971).

Williams created his nautical adventures with authoritative ease for very good reason. In 1929 during the Depression, he enlisted in the Merchant Marines and spent his next ten years sailing the globe before leaving to marry and raise a family. A popular career path available to young men, the Merchant Marines swelled to a prewar level of 55,000. He was trained as a radioman. A biographical account of Williams’ maritime career is described in The Torment and the Calm (Glenat, 2001). The controversial Spanish author Hernan Migoya wrote it in collaboration with Charles Williams’ only child, his daughter Alison Williams. One telling picture shows a happy Williams at the helm of his sailboat on a calm, sunny day.

As a writer, Williams was a late bloomer. From 1939-42, Williams was a radio inspector for RCA in Galveston, Texas. During the war years 1942-46, he did duty as an electronics inspector at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. San Francisco became his home in 1946 where he worked at Mackay Radio until Hill Girl’s phenomenal commercial run in 1951. From age 41 through the next quarter century, he was a professional novelist and sought after scriptwriter. An itinerant lifestyle would take him to such far-flung places as France, Peru, Switzerland, Arizona, California, and Florida.

Charles Williams’ sea novels follow the tradition of American maritime literature, a lineage traced through such authors as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and to nail down the point, Herman Melville. This might stand his thrillers in some pretty tall company, yet aren’t most sea yarns great adventures anyway? Of his contemporary pulpsters, perhaps only John D. MacDonald, also a Charles Williams’ fan, wrote as convincingly and engagingly about boats and sailing.

Once Williams found his land legs in the first seven books, he extended his artistic range to embrace nautical locales. Ed Gorman and William L. De Andrea among others have written that the sea tales showed Williams at the peak of his craft. Edgar winner Ed Hoch believes Williams’ "marine settings bring out an originality that's lacking in" his other novels such as The Wrong Venus (1967).

"Flight to Nowhere," a 55-page novella appearing in a September 1955 issue Manhunt, served as the prequel to his first seagoing saga, Scorpion Reef. Appearing in the same Manhunt issue were such future heavyweights as James T. Farrell and Richard Marsten, aka Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. The novella has been collected in Maxim Jakubowski’s The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction.

The plot in "Flight to Nowhere" involves Bill Manning, a down-on-his-luck salvage diver and writer, who is rooked into a caper by a lady named Shannon Macaulay, a "big, lovely, magnificent Swede." Manning, of course, falls blindly in love with her. Her game is to recover a fortune in diamonds from airplane wreckage on the Scorpion Reef’s bottom in the Gulf of Mexico. Her late husband, a corrupt insurance man, took them with him to his watery grave. Conflict arises when two thugs, Barclay and Barfield, also lust for the loot. They shanghai the couple as prisoners aboard a 36-foot sloop, the Ballerina, and weigh anchor.

Hero and heroine collude to wrest control of the sloop and win the prize. Success proves illusory and bittersweet. Their "flight to nowhere" is ensured by having the police after them for a shoreside murder and other cutthroats after the diamonds. Neither lover has "a prayer of a chance." Their only hope for redemption, the only place to be together, lies under the sea. A bit earlier in a swimming episode with Shannon, Manning describes their bliss. "She brought her arms up very slowly and put them at my neck. We went under, our lips together, arms tight about each other. It was like falling through a warm, rosy cloud." At the novella’s mystical ending, Manning gazes into the water: "It was beckoning up at me. I heard her voice say, ‘Come with me, we’ll live in rapture.’"

This eerie image of peering through the ocean’s depths, of descending through its fathoms is repeated in various key scenes throughout Williams’ sea tales. Such a potent image may have helped inspire the apocryphal story of Williams’ self-death in 1975. The author was rumored to have put out to sea in his boat, then never returned to shore. In truth, his body was recovered in his apartment on April 7, 1975. An examination of social security records indicates his death residence was in the Van Nuys neighborhood (near Hollywood) in Los Angeles, California. The sea, ironically enough, did not claim the burly-shouldered mariner.

"Flight to Nowhere" establishes several other trademarks imprinting Williams’ maritime yarns. Foremost is his slavish attention to the details of sailing: navigation, weather, upkeep, knots, radios, provisions -- every aspect is noted in its precise terms. Second, the visceral power of his seascape descriptions charge the emotions and moods prevailing aboard his boats. If a gale force churns up, it’s a safe bet that dark, sinister forces are also afoot antagonizing the shipmates.

Scorpion Reef was Charles Williams’ breakthrough hardcover, brought out in 1955 by Macmillan in arrangement with his traditional paperback publisher, the shrewd Knox Burger at Fawcett Gold Medal. Three of his four hardbacks, in fact, were issued as sea titles. For the sake of comparison, the hardback cost readers $2.75, appreciably more than a lowly 35-cent pulp paperback. Yet, paperback writers were paid better than the royalties going to hardback writers.

Anthony Boucher in his celebrated NYTBR "Criminals at Large" column wrote of Scorpion Reef: "It’s a grand thriller with tensely shifting suspicion and some fine scenes of diving and sailing in the Gulf of Mexico." The San Francisco Chronicle found it a "good romance, treasure hunt, wonderful villains." At last, Williams, always a mass-market scribbler of pulpy potboilers, could stake his claim as a mainstream hardback author garnering respectable reviews. Williams had succeeded in the subgenre.

Charles Williams’ next sea book (five years later in July 1960) was titled Aground, another hardback, this time brought out by Viking Press. A condensed version of the novel ran in Cosmopolitan the same month. In the 1930s, Cosmopolitan boasted a circulation of 1.7 million and an advertising revenue stream of $5 million. By the late 1950s, the magazine sold a mere million copies, still a respectable readership and good exposure for a suspense novelist in any era.

Aground’s plot is largely a romance at heart. John Ingram, a charter captain, and Rae Osborne, the lady who owns an accidentally beached yacht called the Dragoon, set out to salvage it. Once aboard, two cutthroats lying in wait, Morrison and Ruiz, overwhelm them. The main conflict pits Ingram and Osborne against the plug-uglies to put Dragoon under sail again. In the yacht’s bilge is an explosive cargo, guns and munitions to sell to the latest Latin American revolution and make Morrison a rich man.

Boucher again praised Aground as "admirably tense in its adroit manipulation of a very small cast -- an infectiously exciting open-air thriller." The New York Herald Tribune noted its "very keen edge of apprehension" while the San Francisco Chronicle noted how it was "told with a clarity that looks deceptively easy." Saturday Review weighed in, heralding Aground as "a humdinger." More recently, Bill Pronzini cited on Aground’s back cover: "[this] work is reminiscent of Joseph Conrad in its evocation of man’s affinity for the ocean." The Conrad association has been mentioned again.

This Williams’ suspense novel also exhibits a claustrophobic quality. Despite marooning the yacht on a sandbar off the Great Bahama Bank, the writer confines his action to aboard ship, almost if the Dragoon were really under full sail. Williams remains in control of his characters. Flashy high-octane measures do not generate an overheated plot. Ingram leads the reader through his logic while attempting to get unstuck. We learn about tides and tonnage and gads more. It is, indeed, easy to soak up the vicarious tension as it is with all of Williams’ heroes, ordinary men forced into extraordinary circumstances to excel or fail. The author’s prose style is tough, tactile, and, when necessary, technical. Details about sailing and descriptive passages lend the story its authenticity.

Charles Williams resisted the market strategy of fellow Gold Medal writers John D. MacDonald, Richard S. Prather, and Donald Hamilton to spin out a series with recurring characters, including PIs. He found the process too stultifying. Interestingly enough, John Ingram and Rae Osborne, now man and wife, reappear in Dead Calm, a hardcover edition Viking Press released in 1963.

By now a devout Williams fan, Anthony Boucher praised this novel as a "brilliant tour de force of inventive plotting, fine manipulation of a small cast and breathtaking sequences of spectacular navigation." Fellow crime author Dorothy B. Hughes writing for Book Week said, "no one can handle a boat in print more gracefully than Charles Williams." She went on to qualify that praise by saying, "too much is unfolded in the recitation of past events -- always dull." Even the highbrow The New Yorker gave a cursory yet positive nod, calling it "first-rate."

Ingram and his wife Rae aboard the Orpheus come upon the Saracen, an abandoned sloop in the mid-Pacific. Bellew, the survivor, recounts a virulent case of botulism having wiped out the crew. In this plotline, Williams separates the two ships and puts Ingram on the crippled Saracen under Bellew’s manic control. Meanwhile, Rae on the Orpheus has to sail it with scant solo experience, which Geoffrey O’Brien has suggested strains the reader’s credibility.

The abundant back-story Dorothy Hughes wearied of, again, points to Williams’ concerns to flesh out his primary characters. We learn, for instance, of Rae’s two failed marriages and a son’s early polio death. This revelation amplifies the poignancy of her struggles. The perhaps improbable yacht chase is half the story. What occurred to the Ingrams in their past lives, the land plot if you will, becomes important to Williams’ characterization, even at the risk of disrupting the narrative’s feverish pace.

Fourteen of Charles Williams’ 23 books were bought for movie options. Of those too few filmed, the Australian import Dead Calm from 1989 is generally considered the most successful. Directed by Phillip Noyce, the movie starred Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane. Though Orson Welles had shot a failed project in 1969, Noyce acquired the film rights. He ignored the Welles script and pored over the Williams’ source novel given to him by American producer Tony Bill. Not entirely faithful to the book, Noyce made his "own essential updates" for the 1989 film. It was a good launch pad. Noyce went on to direct Patriot Games while the twenty-two-year-old Nicole Kidman went on to her greater coups, including a recent miscasting in the film, Cold Mountain.

During his final dozen years, the once prolific Charles Williams wrote only three novels. His popularity in France, where his books were translated in Duhamel’s Serie Noire, enabled him to get work there as a scriptwriter. His penultimate novel, And the Deep Blue Sea, appeared in 1971 as a softcover edition from Signet Books/NAL, the year before his wife of 33 years, Lasca Williams, passed away from cancer. This title was a 1972 Edgar nominee for Best Paperback Original in 1972, a professional recognition of its power and interest. The man with a tenth-grade education had almost reached the zenith of his craft. That same year Bill Pronzini, a Williams admirer, was a finalist for the Best First Novel Edgar with The Stalker which made for a nice association between the two fine crime writers at opposite points in their careers.

And the Deep Blue Sea’s packaging was very 1970s. First, the price tag on the paperback, Williams’ last, was ninety-five cents, up from the quarter that Gold Medal had originally charged in 1950. The cover art, a burning boat colored a dark grainy teal, was more restrained than the freewheeling sleazy designs from the early 1950s when Williams first burst on the scene.

The front cover banner touted And the Deep Blue Sea as: "The big bombshell novel that hits with the firepower of Alistair MacLean’s Caravan To Vaccares." The back cover banner goes on to say: "A novel with the taut drama of Arthur Hailey." Sadly, neither breezy accolade does the novel justice. Williams, with his carefully crafted plots, didn’t cater to the new 1970s "high-voltage," over-the-top melodramas produced by such authors as the two just cited.

Not as ambitious as Scorpion Reef or the John Ingram duo, Aground and Dead Calm, this sea novel opens with a forty-five year old divorcee, Harry Goddard, marooned in a dinghy adrift in the Pacific. His 32-foot sloop, the Shosone, has gone under. This time a larger passenger ship is used. A passing tramp freighter, the Leander, rescues Goddard. Once he gets a hot meal inside him, Goddard finds himself in the midst of a mutiny led by shadowy Nazi crewmembers. To make matters worse, a slow-burning fire breaks out in cargo holds containing cotton bales. The freighter is soon aflame.

Once more, shipboard romance and intrigue blooms. Karen Brooke, a young official working for the shipping line, and Madeleine Lennox, an older widow from California, serve as Goddard’s distractions. Unlike Dead Calm, which is heavy on back-story, And the Deep Blue Sea takes a more linear plot. The double-crossing, betrayals, and shifty alliances in the unfolding mutiny have Goddard jumping to figure out just who are the good guys. The intricate plot’s twists and turns are worthy of those in Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen mysteries. The cast of colorful, strong characters on the Leander invites comparison with Katherine Anne Porter’s literary opus, Ship of Fools (1962).

Man on a Leash, a hardback from Putnam’s Red Mask mystery imprint, published in 1973, marked the end of Williams’ career as a novelist. Though set in dry, barren Nevada and California, the protagonist’s dead father, a career sailor, exerts a strong influence over the story. Two years later, after a string of personal and professional setbacks, Charles Williams died alone in early April.

Crossing the bar, the Texan, mariner, and superb storyteller was only 66.

 

 Copyright© 2004 Ed Lynskey

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Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Etienne Borgers, Ed Hoch, Jiro Kimura, and Amy Hayes for their insights in the writing of this article on Charles Williams.

Selected Bibliography

U.S. Social Security Death Index.  Available at various genealogical sites.

Book Review Digest, 1955, 1961, and 1964.

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce F. Murphy.  St. Martins, 1999.

Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers. 2nd Edition.  John M. Reiley, editor.  St. Martins, 1980.

"Fifteen Impressions of Charles Williams" by Ed Gorman.  Murder Off the Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters.  Jon L. Breen and Martin H. Greenberg, editors.  Scarecrow Press, 1989.

Encyclopedia Mysteriosa by William De Andrea.  Prentice Hall, 1994.

Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir by Geoffrey O'Brien.  Da Capo, 1997.

A Catalogue of Crime by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertiz Taylor.  Harper & Row, 1989.

"The Golden Harvest" by Ed Gorman.  The Big Book of Noir.  Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, editors.  Carroll & Graf, 1989.

Merchant Marine information taken from MM web site
(http://www.usmm.org/faq.html).

"About the Production."  Production notes about the making of the  movie, Dead Calm, taken from Sam Neill's web page
(http://www.ibiblio.org/samneill/films/85-89.html#dc).

"A Philosophical Thriller," by John Fraser.
(http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_phil.html).

"An Early History of San Angelo" by Escal F. Duke.
(http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/SS/hds1.html)

 

ED LYNSKEY's crime short fiction has appeared in such online venues as HandHeldCrime, Plots With Guns, Judas, The 3rd Degree, Hardluck Stories, The Murder Hole and others. Ed Lynskey has three novels making the usual rounds: The Dirt-Brown Derby, Pelham Fell Here, and The Blue Cheer.
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