Stanley Reynolds


Stanley Ambrose Harrington Reynolds 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, and Irene Ducharme, who was French-Canadian. He was raised as a Catholic, and spoke only French until he was four. 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. 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.
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.
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. He had a serious heart attack in 2003 and became increasingly disabled, till he was unable to walk. He died on 27 November 2016.