The death of Gareth Williams five years ago was always going to attract the attention of fiction writers. It seemed one part John le Carré (he was a GCHQ codebreaker), one part Agatha Christie (his body was found in a padlocked holdall) and one part EL James (he’d visited bondage websites not long before his death). The surprise is therefore not that London Spy, which began on BBC2 this week, has used the case as inspiration but that it has taken this long.
Tom Rob Smith, who wrote London Spy, has said it’s “entirely a work of fiction: none of the characters are real”. Maybe not, but the similarities between the real-life Williams and the mysterious character named Alex played by Edward Holcroft are hardly subtle.
Both men were fitness fanatics. Williams was a keen cyclist: the first time we meet Alex, he is sweat-drenched, running along the Thames. Both men were child maths prodigies. Williams took a first from Bangor University aged 17; Alex went to university aged 15. Both men were solitary. Williams’s landlady said he never had anyone back to his Cheltenham flat in the decade he lived there; Alex says he has no close friends. Both men were gay. And both men were found dead in similar conditions. Williams in a holdall, Alex in a trunk – and each time with the heating turned up high, presumably to speed the decomposition process.
All of which begs the question: if you were a relative or friend of Gareth Williams, how would you feel watching it? Probably not too thrilled, in all likelihood. The case is still unsolved, the press picked over the prurient details of it, and now a thinly disguised version of a person you loved is appearing on TV.
But London Spy isn’t sensationalist. Quite the opposite. It places great emphasis on the relationship between Alex and Ben Whishaw’s Danny: two fragile souls seeking a connection to each other, an anchor in a stormy world.
When Danny discovers a sex room in Alex’s flat, the focus is more on his reaction to the betrayal it apparently represented than on it per se (though you can imagine a number of awkward conversations taking place up and down the country. “Is that the murder weapon, dear?” “No, Mum, that’s a butt plug.”)
The truth is, writers are magpies: we take, steal, distort and mould endless things from real life in service of our stories. Over the years I’ve cribbed the autopsy reports of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman for the victims of an Aberdeen serial killer, transposed the case of the child murderer Peter Kuerten from Düsseldorf in 1929 to Moscow in 1992, and included the real-life figures of Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling in a novel set in the great smog of London. And so on.
Even the most heinous crimes are not off limits to writers. Many people said in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that it was too horrifying for any fiction writer to ever use, but of course hundreds have done just that. The Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue took the Josef Fritzl case – surely as close to the heart of darkness as most people could imagine – as inspiration for her magnificent Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and has been adapted into a film.
And it was impossible to watch last year’s The Missing, which this newspaper described as “hauntingly brilliant television”, without thinking of Madeleine McCann and the never-ending nightmare of her parents.
A writer has only one real obligation when using real-life cases, and that’s to respect them. Don’t sensationalise; don’t cheapen. Use what those cases say about life and the human condition, about our hopes and fears and dreams and neuroses, to produce something that resonates.
The makers of London Spy may have used the story of Gareth Williams and, even in the narrowest sense of the word, exploited it. But they have not traduced it.
