Christopher Wood — Writing | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Christopher Hovelle Wood (5 November 1935 – 9 May 2015) was an English screenwriter and novelist, best known for the Confessions series of novels and films which he wrote as Timothy Lea. Under his own name, he adapted two James Bond novels for the screen: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, with Richard Maibaum) and Moonraker (1979).

Wood's many novels divide into four groups: semi-autobiographical literary fiction, historical fiction, adventure novels, and pseudonymous humorous erotica.

Christopher Wood was the son of Walter Leonard Wood and Audrey Maud (Hovell) Wood (born 1906). They were married in 1935. He was born in London borough of Lambeth. Wood had three children, one of whom is film producer and literary agent Caroline Wood.

Wood died at his apartment in southwest France on 9 May 2015, and was survived by his son and daughter. However, his death was not widely known until Sir Roger Moore paid tribute to him later that year on Twitter on 17 October.

Wood's parents sent their son to board at Edward VI Grammar School in Norwich to protect him from The Blitz. The Baedeker Blitz of April 1942 saw the adjacent medieval school bombed into rubble. Wood continued his education at King's College Junior School in London where he found himself at risk from "drunken, mentally disturbed, sexual predators" among the staff.

Wood graduated from Peterhouse at Cambridge University in 1960 with degrees in economics and law. He did his mandatory military service in Cyprus, which inspired his second novel Terrible Hard, Says Alice. Novelist and fellow future Bond writer William Boyd praised the book, citing it as one of the few convincing examples of accounts of war alongside Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Wood's African experiences inspired two novels: his first, Make it Happen to Me and his adventure novel A Dove Against Death (1983). Of A Dove Against Death, he recalled, "I was helping to conduct a plebiscite in the Southern Cameroons under UN supervision in 1960. An old man came out of a hut wearing what at first glance I thought was a brass coal scuttle. Then I realized that it was German helmet with a spike on it. My interest began then. Many years later came the story." After considerable research, Wood discovered records of a Dove that was sent to south-west Africa and a wireless station in Togoland that the Germans built and the British destroyed, all of which he wove together to create the novel.

Wood became an account executive at the advertising agency Masius Wynne-Williams where he managed national brands. Like his Masius colleague Desmond Skirrow,] Wood used the daily train commutes between his Royston home and London to write his first several books.

After unsuccessful attempts submitting scripts for television, Wood wrote his first novel which he entitled Nobody Here But Us Pickens. The publishers retitled it Make it Happen to Me. Sales were poor and the book was subsequently withdrawn after a threatened defamation lawsuit.

Wood pitched the idea of a series of erotic comic novels to his publishers at Sphere paperbacks. The first of these books, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, went through multiple editions. ...

Source: Article "Christopher Wood (writer)" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.