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Christopher Hovelle Wood 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…
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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).
Christopher Hovelle Wood 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 and Moonraker (1979).
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 born in the London borough of Lambeth, son of Walter Leonard Wood and Audrey Maud, née Hovell. 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. 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.
With the success of the Confessions books, Wood quit his job at Masius – despite his father's stringent objections – to write full-time. Wood and his family subsequently moved to France.
Wood was also responsible for the Confessions series of novels and their film adaptations, written under the pseudonym Timothy Lea. They are Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Confessions of a Driving Instructor, Confessions from a Holiday Camp, Confessions from a Hotel, Confessions of a Travelling Salesman, Confessions of a Film Extra, Confessions from the Clink, Confessions of a Private Soldier, Confessions from the Pop Scene (adapted into the movie Confessions of a Pop Performer), Confessions from a Health Farm, Confessions from the Shop Floor, Confessions of a Long Distance Lorry Driver, Confessions of a Plumber's Mate, Confessions of a Private Dick, Confessions from a Luxury Liner, Confessions from a Nudist Colony, Confessions of a Milkman, Confessions of an Ice Cream Man and Confessions from a Haunted House. Wood told an interviewer for The Independent in 2013: "The books, and later the films, got terrible reviews, but they were successful, and success was its own currency".
Wood told Penthouse that each Confessions book took approximately five weeks to complete. "They were funny then, and they are funny now", Wood asserted in 2013. "Then again, I always did like smut."
Sphere Books published the first eight Confessions books. After
Source: Christopher Wood (writer) (CC BY-SA)
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Wood intended to continue writing literary fiction, but found the demands on his time too great. He reluctantly decided that "serious writing" would have to wait while the Confessions books were selling. Among projects that were put aside include a tell-all novel about the advertising world.
Critic Richard Newman in Books and Bookmen considered this dichotomy in his review of Wood's historical novel John Adam – Samurai. "I just can't make up my mind about John Adam – Samurai – or, for that matter, its author, Christopher Wood. As a piece of sheer escapism, it's fantastic: it's got just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek cheekiness. My problem is — did he write it as a piece of cerebral fantasy to escape from the frustration of weekdays spent in a London advertising agency (in which case, bully for him); or does he want to be taken as a 'serious' author. To me, however, it's as if all the fantasies of this London advertising man [...] had, at the advanced age of 36, broken out into a cold sweat. Psychiatrists tell us we should shed our fantasies by the time we reach our mid-thirties, so perhaps Christopher Wood is doing just that. And yet, underlying it all, one feels that he has done his homework and knows his Samurai very well. And he really makes you think you are watching it all. Qualities like this are worth developing. His is the imagination which could come up with something really good."
