UNDER his own name William Watson wrote “serious fictions” and plays. Under the pseudonym J. K. Mayo he produced taut and original thrillers which featured as their protagonist the cynical secret agent Colonel Harry Seddall. Although the former were well received, the thrillers sold better — though neither made him a fortune.
In parallel with these activities, Watson worked as a journalist on The Scotsman in its heyday under the editorship of Alastair Dunnett. He had joined the picture department, but later became one of its star writers, one of a bumper crop under Dunnett’s leadership which included Magnus Magnusson and David Kemp.
William Hugh Charles Watson was born in 1931 in Edinburgh, the son of an influential Scottish lawyer. He went to Edinburgh Academy and then to Edinburgh University. But he failed to finish his studies either there or at Oxford, from where he drifted back to Edinburgh and into journalism.
At The Scotsman he soon graduated from his first job as an assistant picture editor to writing, and thrived in an era when the paper was shrugging off its staidness and acknowledging the winds of change blowing through the arts scene in the 1950s and 1960s. He became literary and then features editor, broadening the scope of the paper’s coverage in both fields. His own reviewing tastes were eclectic, not to say eccentric at times.
His real aim, however, was authorship. With Robert Nye he wrote the play Sawney Bean, about the gruesome life of the legendary Scottish cannibal Alexander Bean. It was performed at the Traverse Theatre during the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. Other pieces for the theatre included A Footstool for God, which was premiered at Pitlochry, and The Larch and Dodwell’s Last Trump, both of which were staged at Perth Rep.
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The first of his “serious” novels Better than One, appeared in 1969, the second, Beltran in Exile, a story of the Crusades, ten years later. The last of them, The Night on the Bridge, about the Cathars, was published in 1982.
The relative lack of success of his work in serious mode impelled Watson towards the thriller genre. J. K. Mayo opened his account with The Hunting Season (1986), a complex tale of mystery and intrigue which first introduced Seddall in a somewhat ambiguous light. Wolf’s Head (1987), which opened dramatically with the head of a junior defence minister lolling on a silver coaster at his own country house, further developed the character of the Whitehall troubleshoooter.
Aficionados spoke of a second James Bond, but it was not quite to be, although the books were ingeniously plotted and highly readable. The final book of the series, which included Cry Havoc (1990) and A Shred of Honour (1993), was The Interloper, which was published in 1997.
In the 1990s Watson had gravitated back towards journalism, on the night sub- editing desk of The Herald in Glasgow, which enabled him to devote his days to writing.
Watson’s first marriage, to Bridget Peck, was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, the theatre director Catherine Robins.
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William Watson, novelist, playwright and journalist, was born on April 30, 1931. He died on December 6, 2005, aged 74.