Charles Williams (U.S. Author) - Literary Style

Literary Style

Williams's work is identified with the noir fiction subgenre of hardboiled crime writing. His 1953 novel Hell Hath No Fury—published by the defining pulp crime fiction house, Gold Medal Books—was the first paperback original to merit a review from renowned critic Anthony Boucher of The New York Times. Boucher relates Williams to two of the most famous noir fiction writers: "The striking suspense technique...may remind you of Woolrich; the basic story, with its bitter blend of sex and criminality, may recall James M. Cain. But Mr. Williams is individually himself in his sharp but unmannered prose style and in his refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises." Ed Gorman's description of a characteristic Williams novel, Man on the Run (1958), outlines the essential elements that associate it with the noir fiction category: "a) a falsely accused man trying to elude police, b) a lonely woman as desperate in her way as the man on the run, c) enough atmospherics (night, rain, fog) to enshroud a hundred films noir." Cultural critic Geoffrey O'Brien further details Williams's "chief characteristics":

a powerfully evoked natural setting, revelation of character through sexual attitudes and behavior, and a conversational narrative voice that makes the flimsiest tale seem worth telling.... His narrator is generally an ordinary, curiously amoral fellow fueled by greed and lust but curiously detached from his own crimes. are variations on the same serviceable plot: boy meets money, boy gets money, boy loses money. Each of them hinges on a woman, and it is in the intricacies of the man-woman relationship that Williams finds his real subject.... ften the woman is both more intelligent and—even when she is a criminal—more aware of moral complexities than the affectless hero.

Lee Horsley describes how Williams frequently satirizes his male protagonists' points of view, while implicitly reassessing the traditional genre figure of the femme fatale.

Williams's novel River Girl (1951) is described by pulp fiction expert George Tuttle as a "classic example of backwoods noir...us an Erskine Caldwell type setting to heighten the sexual overtones of the story." Many of Williams's other novels are also of this "backwoods noir" type: Hill Girl; Big City Girl; Go Home, Stranger; The Diamond Bikini; Girl Out Back; and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls. Williams also turned often, particularly late in his career, to what might be called "blue-water noir": Scorpion Reef, The Sailcloth Shroud, Aground, Dead Calm, and And The Deep Blue Sea. Woody Haut argues that Williams, like fellow pulp novelist Charles Willeford, wrote stories fueled by an "antipathy to state power, state crimes and the creation of social conditions leading to criminal activity. Relying on wit, humor and ingenious plotting, Williams's characters constantly attempt to outwit the system."