John Hartley Williams: 5 books

Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe,...

The long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams' new collection is a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barge travelling an unnamed waterway. Some of his remarks are addressed to his talisman, the shrunken head of an African tribesman....

Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge; by a spooked...

Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The d�cor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and...

The cream of Britain's poets are getting murdered. Victor Priest takes on two assistants to help investigate. In a hilarious and dramatic denoument the criminal is discovered. Priest hires two assistants to help track the criminal. Despite their unconventional and hilarious behaviour they bring the case to a dramatic conclusion.