In his most accomplished novel, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, David Compton, who has died aged 93, anticipated the impact of reality television on the lives of its subjects. The book was published under the name of DG Compton in 1974, at least two decades before the fad for fly-on-the-wall documentaries revealed the ghoulish public curiosity in personal traumas.
Compton’s story describes a programme about a woman with a terminal illness. The book was later filmed by Bertrand Tavernier as Death Watch (La Mort en Direct, 1980), in which Romy Schneider played the dying woman, and Harvey Keitel the TV journalist whose eyes have been replaced by tiny cameras and who covertly and intimately records her last days.
Compton was a diverse and fluent writer, who once complained that he would write more books if only he was able to find more ideas that presented themselves to him “with the whole glorious kit of parts” – that is, where the story, characters and meaning came to him whole. Over the years he assumed various writing personas, but shrugged away the idea that he was hardworking.
At first, from the early 1960s, he wrote quirky radio plays: although many were broadcast by the BBC they were not enough to make his name or his fortune. Two favourites were eventually published as Radio Plays (1988). After reinventing himself as Guy Compton, he produced six thrillers with Hodder & Stoughton, published between 1962 and 1967. Again, he felt that he was failing to make an impact and that the crime novel was not exactly stretching him.
The breakthrough arrived unexpectedly, with a book he called The Quality of Mercy (1965), which indeed came to him, now as DG Compton, with “the whole kit of parts”. He felt it was his first substantial piece of work. Rather to his surprise, Hodder offered him much more money than before and asked if they could market it as science fiction. With only a hazy awareness of the genre, Compton agreed.
Over the next decade he produced a steady stream of sci-fi novels, conceived in the same way as the first, and it is on these that his lasting reputation rests. His work relied on intelligent, subtle prose, with well delineated characters and the plausible depiction of human situations. Going against the conventions of sci-fi, a sense of English nostalgia imbued his writing. The elegiac The Silent Multitude (1967) is set in an English cathedral slowly succumbing to a space-borne fungus that rots buildings, with faith and hope helpless against inexorable reality. He gave one novel of time travel the quirky title Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something That Might Have Been Castor Oil (1970), although his American publisher brusquely changed this to the more genre-acceptable Chronocules.
Many of his plots dealt with vicarious experience: events witnessed at a distance, lending the books a touch of satire.
These quiet virtues as a novelist gained him many admirers, but some fans of traditional SF were not completely won over by his apparent distrust in technology and scepticism about the future.
Still unable to live on the profits of his serious writing, Compton assumed the female pseudonym Frances Lynch, and in the 1970s produced a successful series of romantic novels, alternating these with his SF. At the same time he took a job with Reader’s Digest, condensing novels for their popular editions: colleagues there said that his work was outstanding. At first, the thought of this delicate literary craftsman hacking away at the work of others seems anomalous, but it reflects the economy and skill of his own writing.
Born in London, David was the son of the actors Nuna Davey, the stage name of Margaret Symonds, and her husband, Gerald Cross, best known as the local newspaper editor Arnold Tripp in the 1960s BBC soap The Newcomers.
From Cheltenham college David went straight on to national service in the army, and in 1950 his mother obtained a job for him with Leatherhead repertory theatre as an assistant stage manager. An affair with the wife of the stage director brought a premature end to his theatrical career, but marked the beginning of his own first marriage, in 1952, to Elizabeth Taylor (nee Tillotson).
A variety of jobs followed: Compton worked in Heal’s, became a furniture maker, a postal worker, a door-to-door salesperson and a docker, all part-time jobs intended to enable him to write in his spare time. At one point, he and his wife lived near Bideford, in Devon, and in 1962 befriended Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, with Plath dedicating her novel The Bell Jar (1963) to them. David and Elizabeth divorced in 1967, and, under her later married name of Sigmund, Elizabeth went on to write about Plath.
In 1969 Compton married Carol Curtis-Brown Savage, and from 1981 they increasingly lived in the US, her home country.
Compton continued to publish sci-fi novels until 1996, including a rare collaboration with the British science and sci-fi author John Gribbin: Ragnarok (1991), exploring the theme of nuclear winter. The nonfiction study Stammering: Its Nature, History, Causes, and Cures appeared in 1993. His fiction is remembered in the new century: in 2005 he was honoured by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as Author Emeritus, the only Briton to receive this award. That was followed in 2021 by the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for authors deserving of greater attention. A final non-fantastic novel was So Here’s Our Leo (2022).
Carol died in 2005. David is survived by a stepson from her first marriage, Toby Savage, and three of the four children, Margaret, Hester and James, from his own first marriage.
• David Guy Compton, author, born 19 August 1930; died 10 November 2023
