Charles Williams: Pulp on the High Seas
Thanks to the movies, Charles Williams was a favorite of mine before I knew he existed. Truffaut's last film, Confidentially Yours (originally Vivement dimanche!) -- which I loved -- was based on Williams' The Long Saturday Night. And his novel Dead Calm was turned into a movie thriller which introduced the world to Nicole Kidman. It was another favorite of mine, but not for her sake. Anything starring Sam Neil during the post-Reilly, Ace of Spies to pre-Jurassic Park era is on my list of wonders. He made a great John Ingram and would have been even better if the movie had hewn closer to the line of the book.
It never occurred to me in the late 80s that these movies might have had novels behind them. (The connection was made a bit harder by the fact that there's another novelist named Charles Williams, a compatriot of C. S. Lewis, with whom I was familiar.) Once I made the discovery, though, I started devouring the entire Williams opus, as the photo above suggests.
He started by writing tightly-plotted pulp novels featuring hard luck men and femme fatales. Somewhere along the way, he moved the action onto the water. It's a great combination. In Dead Calm, he takes the babes and brawls already known to appeal to male readers and adds celestial navigation. I can barely navigate with a GPS unit, and yet I was riveted every time Ingram had to make a compass adjustment in his head. And Dead Calm is actually the second novel featuring Ingram. He and his future wife Rae first meet in Aground, which is quite good, too. Predictable as it is to declare the book better than the movie, in the case of Dead Calm, it really is.
I wouldn't say the same about The Long Saturday Night. Truffaut takes the jumbled plot and makes it highly entertaining, adapting the Texas setting to French locales without much trouble, resulting in a black-and-white homage to noir that ditches the dark tone and seems the better for it. Then again, maybe it's just the fact that Fanny Ardant is in the lead.
