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Thirty-four years ago this autumn the London literary world was allowing itself to be mildly diverted by the prospect of a bold new departure in English letters - the foundation of a big-money annual award for fiction. Clearly, sniffed the pundits, this newly christened "Booker prize" couldn't be expected to last, but in the meantime the judges - a lustrous cadre including Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode - had produced their debut shortlist. No surprise to find Iris Murdoch among the six with The Nice and the Good or Muriel Spark's The Public Image, but there on the end of the file is a novel that has all but vanished into literary history: From Scenes Like These, by a certain GM (or sometimes Gordon M, or occasionally, plain Gordon) Williams. Most labourers in the valley of the shadow of books, to use George Gissing's deathless phrase, have their left-field favourites: novels that got away, works of such luminous but unacknowledged distinction that to re-read them is to wonder eternally why the author isn't a household name. My own candidate is From Scenes Like These, a bleak but by no means humourless account of a teenage boy put to work on an Ayrshire farm in the early 1950s, and to these eyes, one of the greatest novels of the postwar era. Back in 1969 its author, then 35, looked to have the world at his feet.

His previous novel, The Man Who Had Power Over Women, had gone over big in Hollywood: Paramount paid £27,000 for the film rights, which was then a tidy sum. Booker-shortlisted Scenes (in the end the prize went to another lost hero, the late PH Newby) had given him seriously literary credibility. He had already produced a follow-up, a nervy thriller called The Siege of Trencher's Farm. Seized on by Hollywood gore-meister Sam Peckinpah ("makes you want to drown in your own puke" ran Sam's encomium), this re-emerged on celluloid as the crunchy, censor-baiting Straw Dogs. There were more books - a dozen at least, in a variety of genres - high-profile television commissions (the Hazel series, co-written with his old mucker, Terry Venables) but no more Booker shortlistings. By the mid-80s a writer praised for his "tremendously fierce truthfulness" by Melvyn Bragg seemed to have disappeared off the literary map. Then, out of the blue, something happened. The British Board of Film Classification, long unimpressed by a scene in Straw Dogs in which Susan George appears to enjoy the experience of being raped, finally opted to grant video certification. Shambling into the light at last, accompanied by a paperback reissue of Trencher's (now retitled after the film), comes its begetter - reticent, occasionally evasive about details, but apparently willing to talk. In a London cafe, Williams turns out to be an amiable, heavily accented Scot in sight of his 70th birthday. He seems nonplussed by the obvious questions about his recent whereabouts. There is talk of film and TV work, a stint composing a widescreen version of Ruth Rendell's The Tree of Hands, along with the ironic revelation that on the very day that John Sutherland speculated on his probable death in the pages of this newspaper, our man was busily at work (project unspecified) in the Guardian offices. But why did he stop writing novels? "I got bored," he says. By way of Herculean digressions on such subjects as film directors, professional boxing and the mid-60s soccer scene, we attend to the ups and downs of his career. Born in Paisley, five years before the outbreak of the second world war, he started out as an provincial journalist. It was by all accounts a vagrant life. By the age of 23, he told Terry Coleman in a 1968 Guardian interview, he calculated that he had lived at 28 separate addresses. Come the early 60s, his twin fixations - writing and football - were moving closer together: he was offered the job of sports correspondent on the Daily Mail colour magazine, with a brief to commission pieces from soccer stars. Prompted by an enterprising agent, he quickly divined that it was easier to write them himself. Early clients in the ghost-writing line included the then Chelsea manager Tommy Docherty and a hotly tipped teenage talent named Terry Venables. Within a year or so Williams was hanging around the fringes of the England World Cup squad and, among other tasks, ghosting Bobby Moore's autobiography.

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Thirty-four years ago this autumn the London literary world was allowing itself to be mildly diverted by the prospect of a bold new departure in English letters - the foundation of a big-money annual award for fiction. Clearly, sniffed the pundits, this newly christened "Booker prize" couldn't be expected to last, but in the meantime the judges - a lustrous cadre including Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode - had produced their debut shortlist. No surprise to find Iris Murdoch among the six with The Nice and the Good or Muriel Spark's The Public Image, but there on the end of the file is a novel that has all but vanished into literary history: From Scenes Like These, by a certain GM (or sometimes Gordon M, or occasionally, plain Gordon) Williams. Most labourers in the valley of the shadow of books, to use George Gissing's deathless phrase, have their left-field favourites: novels that got away, works of such luminous but unacknowledged distinction that to re-read them is to wonder eternally why the author isn't a household name. My own candidate is From Scenes Like These, a bleak but by no means humourless account of a teenage boy put to work on an Ayrshire farm in the early 1950s, and to these eyes, one of the greatest novels of the postwar era. Back in 1969 its author, then 35, looked to have the world at his feet. His previous novel, The Man Who Had Power Over Women, had gone over big in Hollywood: Paramount paid £27,000 for the film rights, which was then a tidy sum. Booker-shortlisted Scenes (in the end the prize went to another lost hero, the late PH Newby) had given him seriously literary credibility. He had already produced a follow-up, a nervy thriller called The Siege of Trencher's Farm. Seized on by Hollywood gore-meister Sam Peckinpah ("makes you want to drown in your own puke" ran Sam's encomium), this re-emerged on celluloid as the crunchy, censor-baiting Straw Dogs. There were more books - a dozen at least, in a variety of genres - high-profile television commissions (the Hazel series, co-written with his old mucker, Terry Venables) but no more Booker shortlistings. By the mid-80s a writer praised for his "tremendously fierce truthfulness" by Melvyn Bragg seemed to have disappeared off the literary map. Then, out of the blue, something happened. The British Board of Film Classification, long unimpressed by a scene in Straw Dogs in which Susan George appears to enjoy the experience of being raped, finally opted to grant video certification. Shambling into the light at last, accompanied by a paperback reissue of Trencher's (now retitled after the film), comes its begetter - reticent, occasionally evasive about details, but apparently willing to talk. In a London cafe, Williams turns out to be an amiable, heavily accented Scot in sight of his 70th birthday. He seems nonplussed by the obvious questions about his recent whereabouts. There is talk of film and TV work, a stint composing a widescreen version of Ruth Rendell's The Tree of Hands, along with the ironic revelation that on the very day that John Sutherland speculated on his probable death in the pages of this newspaper, our man was busily at work (project unspecified) in the Guardian offices. But why did he stop writing novels? "I got bored," he says. By way of Herculean digressions on such subjects as film directors, professional boxing and the mid-60s soccer scene, we attend to the ups and downs of his career. Born in Paisley, five years before the outbreak of the second world war, he started out as an provincial journalist. It was by all accounts a vagrant life. By the age of 23, he told Terry Coleman in a 1968 Guardian interview, he calculated that he had lived at 28 separate addresses. Come the early 60s, his twin fixations - writing and football - were moving closer together: he was offered the job of sports correspondent on the Daily Mail colour magazine, with a brief to commission pieces from soccer stars. Prompted by an enterprising agent, he quickly divined that it was easier to write them himself. Early clients in the ghost-writing line included the then Chelsea manager Tommy Docherty and a hotly tipped teenage talent named Terry Venables. Within a year or so Williams was hanging around the fringes of the England World Cup squad and, among other tasks, ghosting Bobby Moore's autobiography. Remittance Advice
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