John Hartley Williams

Page Updated: 15/03/02

John Hartley Williams

Mystery in Spiderville

and

Books By John Hartley Williams

About the Author

Bibliography

British Pbk Original - Jonathan Cape (2001)

Mystery in Spiderville
Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now place John Hartley Williams – though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The décor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt - has six toes, sleeps in a grave and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons. Sucked into the vortex of Spider’s philandering mind is a narrator - sometimes Spider’s adversary, sometimes his victim - who lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings - and homicidal tendencies.
A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, Mystery in Spiderville cannot be pigeon-holed or summarized: it is one of the strangest, strongest and most arresting fictional debuts in years.

About The Author
John Hartley Williams is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Spending Time with Walter (2001). He teaches English at the Free University of Berlin, where he has been since 1976.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Mystery in Spiderville (Jonathan Cape Pbk, 2001)