Dead Secret

'an authentic writer' - Noel Coward

If you don't want trouble, a Dead Secret is best left alone.

How did the Nazis keep fighting for so long without any oil fields of their own?

Could they have been supplied by the big Western companies?

It seems such a simple question, but reporter Tom Hawn only ever heard one man ask it.

And the next day that man was dead.

But Tom Hawn never walked away from trouble; now he has as much as he can handle.

And then some more.

Dead Secret is a power-packed story of one man's search for an answer to the question that everyone should ask ...

Praise for Alan Williams:

Williams won immediate acclaim with his first novel: Long Run South was runner-up in the 1963 John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Noel Coward wrote in his diary, "I have read a thriller by my godson Alan Williams called Long Run South and it is really very good indeed. He is an authentic writer. There is, as with all his generation, too much emphasis on sex, squalor and torture and horror, but it's graphically and imaginatively written."

The Sunday Telegraph declared Barbouze a 'compassionate thriller'.

The Sunday Times praised the exuberance and poetry in the writing which the reviewer noted was then very rare in British fiction.

Books & Bookmen called Williams "the natural successor to Ian Fleming."

British Book News said "Alan Williams is a thriller writer who has conspicuously succeeded in the rare feat of combining a novelist's art with a journalist's training."

The New York Times critic Martin Levin said, "If you were to ask me who were the top ten writers of intrigue novels, I would list Alan Williams among the first five."

Alan Emlyn Williams(born 1935) is an ex-foreign correspondent, novelist and writer of thrillers. He was educated at Stowe, Grenoble and Heidelberg Universities, and at King's College, Cambridge where he graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in modern languages. His father was the actor and writer Emlyn Williams. Noel Coward was his godfather. His younger brother Brook (1938 - 2005) was also an actor.

Williams was briefly married to literary agent Maggie Noach (1949 - 2006) Together they compiled The Dictionary of Disgusting Facts. Journalist Philippa Toomey describes him as a "talented and funny mimic with a gift for words and a stock of tales from the shaggy Express story to the grimmer side of international journalism."


Genre: Thriller