Charles Williams - 21 Novels

In the US, Charles Williams is best known today--if he's known at all--for his suspense novels, probably because Dead Calm was made into a successful movie starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane and because Francois Truffaut made The Long Saturday Night into a movie called Confidentially Yours.

I too like his suspense novels, but I like his comedies better and I like his noirs best of all. You might be wondering what the difference is between a suspense novel and a noir novel. Well, it's just my way of categorizing Williams' stories. In the suspense stories the hero finds himself in trouble through no fault of his own and there's always a happy ending. In the noirs, the hero makes his own trouble and the endings are Dantesque--that is, they're like the punishments dished out in Dante's Inferno, always perfectly fitting the crime. In my opinion, the best of these noir stories are Hell Hath No Fury, A Touch of Death, The Big Bite, and Girl Out Back. They make Williams the true heir of James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

The Noirs
Hill Girl (1951)
Big City Girl (1951)
River Girl (1951), also known as The Catfish Tangle
Hell Hath No Fury (1953), also known as The Hot Spot
Nothing in Her Way (October 1953)
A Touch of Death (October 1954), also known as Mix Yourself a Redhead
The Big Bite (1956)
Girl Out Back (1958), also known as Operator
All the Way (September 1958), also known as The Concrete Flamingo

The Comedies
The Diamond Bikini (1956)
The Wrong Venus (1966), also known as Don't Just Stand There

The Suspense Novels
Go Home, Stranger (February 1954)
Gulf Coast Girl (1955), also known as Scorpion Reef
Talk of the Town (1958), also known as Stain of Suspicion
Man on the Run (1958), also known as Man in Motion
Aground (1960)
The Sailcloth Shroud (1960)
The Long Saturday Night (March 1962), also known as Finally, Sunday! and Confidentially Yours
Dead Calm (1963)
And the Deep Blue Sea (1971). This one could also be classified as a comedy since it's a spoof of Hollywood movies.
Man on a Leash (1973)

The One That Got Away
The only Williams' novel missing from this collection is a comedy, Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959)--a book hard to find at a reasonable price, unless you speak French. It's never gone out of print in France. One reviewer said it's funnier than Diamond Bikini. If so, it's very, very funny.
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