Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels-which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. He was a radio inspector during the war years at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington state. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years (1929-1939) before leaving to work in the electronics industry. (Dec.Charles Williams was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Auden, among others, will find Lindop's book an informative and accessible introduction.
Readers interested in learning more about a writer whose work was highly regarded by T.S. Lindop does a masterful job of relating Williams's expansive bibliography to his intellectual passions and his messy personal life, which was frequently complicated by platonic love affairs with the young female coworkers he mentored. A tireless workaholic, Williams also wrote novels, plays, essays, tracts, and reams of verse in his spare time, much of it steeped in Christian theology and concerned with the relationship between the spiritual and the sexual%E2%80%94what he referred to as "the Church system and the love system." Williams's complex, original vision brought him to the attention of Lewis in 1936 and made him a perfect fit with Lewis's circle of fellow academics and writers.
Williams's formal education ended at 17, but he read omnivorously and rose rapidly at Oxford University Press from proofreader to editor. Tolkien%E2%80%94fellow members of the Oxford-based literary group the Inklings%E2%80%94but he gets his due in this exhaustively researched biography from Lindop (Travels on the Dance Floor). Williams was overshadowed in the years following his death in 1945 by C.S.
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