Stanley Reynolds

Stanley Ambrose Harrington Reynolds[1][2] (1934–2016) was an American journalist, author, and critic who spent most of his life in the UK. He was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on 27 November 1934, to Ambrose Harrington Reynolds, a sales manager for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company,[3] and Irene Ducharme, who was French-Canadian.[4] He was raised as a Catholic, and spoke only French until he was four.[5] He served in the US military with the First Infantry Division. He met his wife, Gillian Morton, in Holyoke; she was from Liverpool and was spending a year studying at Mount Holyoke College.[4] The couple moved to the UK together, where they married in 1958. They returned to the US for a year, and Reynolds worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, but returned to the UK by 1960.[5]

Reynolds worked for The Guardian in the 1960s, and published his first novel, Better Dead than Red, in 1964; it was praised by Anthony Burgess as "savagely funny". He also wrote the lyrics for a production of George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. He later turned freelance, and as a freelancer wrote for The Guardian, The Times, The European, and Punch, where he took a job as literary editor in 1980. In 1980 he made a BBC documentary called Great Little Railways, about a trip through the Ecuadorean Andes.[4]

His first marriage ended in divorce in 1975, and he remarried, to Jane McLoughlin, in 2004. He wrote crime novels included Death Dyed Blonde, which appeared in 2008. He was a notoriously heavy drinker, but gave up alcohol in 1984.[4] He had a serious heart attack in 2003 and became increasingly disabled, till he was unable to walk.[4][5] He died on 27 November 2016.[4]