My obit of Lionel Davidson, whose eight adult novels won three CWA Gold Daggers, is in today's Indpendent; you can link to it here. I suspect Davidson will be one of those rare writers who gets revived cyclically; his work is firmly rooted into its various settings, and times, and this, along with the intricacies of his plotting will probably intrigue new audiences.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
LIONEL DAVIDSON: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY
My obit of Lionel Davidson, whose eight adult novels won three CWA Gold Daggers, is in today's Indpendent; you can link to it here. I suspect Davidson will be one of those rare writers who gets revived cyclically; his work is firmly rooted into its various settings, and times, and this, along with the intricacies of his plotting will probably intrigue new audiences.
Blown away by Kolymsky Heights (The Chelsea Murders was another favourite) I asked Davidson to do a CADS Questionnaire in March 1999. Our correspondence was brief and to the point though one letter resulted in a phone conversation one evening. My hasty notes at the time reveal that at least some of the film scripts he worked on were for Hal Wallis (though I neglected to ask which ones). He was also proud of his script for the TV dramatisation of The Chelsea Murders, and of the fact that he won a BAFTA for his adaptation of his own David Line novel, published first in the US as Soldier and Me (later as Run for Your Life in the UK). In the Questionnaire he mentioned Eric Ambler (natch!) as a key influence (along with “all the earlier adventure writers”) as well as, perhaps unsurprisingly, Waugh and Wodehouse. He had recently enjoyed Iain Pears for his “marvellous” An Instance of the Fingerpost, and the crime novel he would most like to have written was Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Similarly he was “pleasantly surprised” by a cutting I had sent him in which Barry Gifford had cited The Rose of Tibet as the book he (Gifford) would most like to have written.
ReplyDeleteHe also regretted his occasional failure to “get things right a bit quicker” (Kolymsky had “eleven different starts” ) But in that brief phone conversation he mentioned that he had a new book “close to completion”. I wonder what became of it...
I missed those film credits, thanks Bob. I had seen that quote about American Tragedy, but hadnt known Barry admired Rose of Tibet so much: it does makes sense....
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