The Heald Report . . .                                                                  Number 7    OCTOBER 2003

Just back to desk after three weeks away.

First I had a few days in Miami combining business - a travel piece for the Tatler, meeting with the Cunard line's manager of 'enrichment' programmes - and pleasure - the christening of Leonel, my daughter Emma's first child. Then I was in an attractive rented farmhouse near Corfe Castle for a fortnight helping look after my handicapped cousin while his full-time carers had a holiday. I also managed to get some writing done, though not as much as I'd hoped. There was no phone at the house and my mobile had gone missing in Miami. It's curious and rather alarming to find how much one has come to rely on new devices such as laptop e-mail and mobiles. One managed perfectly well without them. Or did one?

The saddest event of the last few days has been the death of my friend David Williams. I had already written an obituary for the Daily Telegraph. This had actually been done under instruction from David when he went in for major heart surgery a few years back and was none too confident of surviving. I rang the Times to alert them and also suggested that Simon Brett might do one for the Guardian. I also got a commission to write one for the Independent. It was very galling to find a few days later that the Guardian and Times both ran obituaries of David but, at least at the moment of writing, neither the Independent nor the Telegraph had done so. I feel bad about this, not so much for myself as for David. I feel I've let him down so as a minor recompense I'm ending this report with the obituary I did for the Independent. I hope some people will read it and even go out and get one of David's books.

Here it is:

David Williams, the crime writer, was an extraordinary example of bloody-minded guts and determination concealed under a carapace of laconic and self-deprecating charm and amiability.          When I first met him some thirty years ago he was an elegant, slim, silver-haired cove who always dressed in dark suits with a white suit and tie and a red carnation in his button-hole. He claimed that this unchanging uniform was designed to avoid the tireseome and time-consuming business of deciding what to wear every morning but actually it was more than that - it was a statement of style. There was never anything even remotely sloppy about David and he regarded a smartness, even marginal flamboyance, in dress as a mark of self respect as well as a courtesy to others. It was much the same with the Rolls Royce he always drove. He used to protest that he couldn't afford a newer car but actually this too was a style statement and a bit like him - ageing, but always good-looking and smart without being too obvious. He enjoyed driving it too.         He was at that stage in his life a crime-writer, crafting short, neat, fastidiously written whodunnits involving an Inspector Treasure. Some critics dismissed these as "cosy" but David would protest that he respected proper English and tight plotting and had no time for dismembered limbs in bin-bags, sloppy or disgusting language, unnatural sex or the gruesome details of the dissecting table. He denied that this made him "cosy" and, with some justice, thought "classy" was a better word.         I did not at first realise that crime-writing was his second career. He had read English at St. John's Oxford where his contemporaries included such luminaries as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Philip Larkin so always set store by literature but from university he went into advertising. He was so successful at this that by early middle-age he had his own advertising agency with such agreeable concomitants as a regular table at the Savoy not to mention the Rolls Royce and the red carnation.         He was poised for yet more success for Mrs. Thatcher, no less, had spotted him and identified him as something the Conservative party was much in need of: the acceptable face of capitalism. David, a former chorister - he had won a place at St. Pauls, but his father, a South Wales journalist, thought this too much and sent him to Hereford Cathedral instead - was always seriously, if unshowily, religious. In his spare time he had even taken to occasional lunch-time debating from city pulpits - he was Welsh after all! There he argued the case for conservatism with compassion, persuasively and eloquently. Mrs. T was impressed. Glory beckoned.         Then fate intervened in a melodramatic way he would never have allowed in his fiction. He suffered a stroke so severe that he was not expected to live. He lost his speech and much of his movement. Friends stayed at his bedside for months expecting the worse.         Somehow however he recovered so that by the time I met him you would never have known what he had endured. Over the next years he carved out a considerable career as an author becoming a much-loved member of the Detection Club, a contributor to several short story anthologies as well as regularly producing an annual full-length book. He managed always to seem surprised, and disarmingly chirpy, when things went well. He was particularly pleased when, recently, his usual enormous commercial publisher turned down a collection of his short stories with hurtful disdain. They were accepted instead by the much smaller house of Robert Hale who sold them in thousands. He was also purring with pride at a recent Claridges dinner given for donors of manuscripts to Boston University (they have a David Williams archive) to learn that one of his crime stories had sold yet another set of subsidiary rights introducing him to a whole new audience of women's magazine readers.         He was, I think, the politest man I ever knew but his was not the sort of empty politeness of an etiquette manual, it was something innate. It was the product of a genuine kindness and a desire to put people at their ease. Above all, you always felt with David that he really cared for those he liked and loved.

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