The Problem with Charles Williams
Part of the problem has to do with disambiguation. Whenever I recommend him, I have to explain which Charles Williams I mean. As I've mentioned before, there were two of them, and the more famous of the two these days is the other Charles Williams, the minor Inkling. Part of the problem, too, is the lurid cover art. There's a certain kitsch appeal thanks to the passage of time. Even so, you look at the cover and think you're entering the realm of guilty pleasure. Sure, there's pleasure, but no need to feel guilty about it. Charles Williams knew how to write.
The real problem with Charles Williams is that he's mostly out of print. That makes no sense to me at all.
Like Simenon, another of my obsessive favorites, Williams keeps telling more or less the same story. Some middle-aged loner with a seafaring bent gets into trouble alongside an exceptional woman. At some point, there will be a math problem to work out, usually having to do with navigation. I'm no good at math, but I find this stuff riveting. In fact, the trouble with the film adaptation of Dead Calm is that it cuts out all the math. That's a book about dead reckoning under extreme pressure. Put a nav computer onboard and you lose the spine of the story.
Not all of Williams' books take place on sea. Until recently, I've kept them sorted into two mental piles -- the land-based books and the nautical noir. That changed a couple of weeks ago when I started reading Man on a Leash, in which a grounded sailor confronts the bank-robbing cabal that murdered his father.
Above: It must have killed the designer
not to be able to put a swimsuited babe on the cover.
The reason I'd put Leash off is that I figured it wouldn't have the navigational problem to solve. Oh, but it does. To find the lair of the villains, the main character has to figure out where his father drove, with nothing but an odometer reading and the dust on the car to guide him. This might seem impossible to you or me, but a Charles Williams protagonist is used to pinpointing tiny sloops on the vast stretch of the Pacific. All he has to do in this case is get out a map and take every available route until he finds a location at mid-point that seems promising. All he has to do, in other words, is the math.
When I realized the problem was here on land just as it is in the sea novels, I remembered that this isn't the only case of geographical math in Williams' non-nautical books. In his noir classic The Hot Spot, the central caper relies on fitting a careful timeline to the well-traveled landscape. There are spatial/mathematical problems to be worked out in some of the others, too.
All this to say, Williams makes for compelling reading. If you're not convinced, check out Ed Lynskey's piece on Williams, weighing his greatness against his relative lack of renown. A lot of writers slip into obscurity deservedly. In some cases, though, it's a crying shame. As for me, I'm snatching his books up wherever I can find them.
