An Extravagant Life

April 15, 2022
An autobiography from the bestselling creator of Stone Barrington that incorporates the text of Woods' 1977 sailing memoir, Blue Water, Green Skipper. Readers hungry for details of how Woods wrote his dozens of novels will come away mostly with a single word: quickly. "I could write almost as fast as I could think," he notes, adding that since "I had a gift for holding the book in my head," he saw little need to revise: "I was, and have always been, lightly edited." Woods spends longer describing his forebears than his childhood and lavishes considerably more detail on his fondness for dining at Elaine's (one chapter) than on his disastrous third marriage (one paragraph in that chapter). Nor will curious fans learn much about his other marriages, most of the people who mattered most to him--his "best friend," his second wife's father, is evoked in a single paragraph noting his death--or his interior life. What they will learn, if they didn't suspect it already, is how many features of the author's tales of Stone Barrington are directly transcribed from his life: the coyly described sexual encounters, the love of dining at Elaine's, the insatiable appetite for acquiring high-end toys (two Porsches, three airplanes, an upgraded room aboard the QE2 and dwellings in Key West, Santa Fe, Maine, Connecticut, England, and, most entertainingly, New York). The best thing here is the embedded reprinting of Blue Water, Green Skipper, which describes the author's determination to enter a race of sailboats crossing the Atlantic, a journey he made alone and successfully. This sharply written segment, which occupies more than half the pages of the memoir, is marked by a conflict-driven story whose narrator repeatedly surmounts discouraging obstacles in pursuit of a quixotic dream. After that, it's back to stories about Woods' dogs, work in advertising, and wildly successful career as a novelist. Chatty, anecdotal, guilelessly immodest, and utterly unrevealing.

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April 23, 2022

With 87 books under his belt, Edgar Award--winning suspense novelist Woods (Chiefs; "Stone Barrington" series) should have much to say about the difficult act of writing in this memoir, but he doesn't. The real problem, though, is his account of the rest of his life. It's neither terribly interesting nor revealing, except for a long segment on sailing that takes up more than half the book (and was published as Blue Water, Green Skipper in 1977). There's little in Woods's story of his life to capture readers' imaginations. The yachting segment describes his first cross-ocean sail race in 1976. While it captures the excitement the experience, non-racing fanatics will soon tire of the technical details. The rest of the book disappoints. Just when his writing life takes off, his telling of it degenerates into a chronicle of his three failed and fourth existent marriages and the purchase, renovation and use of a string of houses, boats, cars and planes (six all told, though not at once). There's no question life has treated Woods well but his satisfaction with it is off-putting. VERDICT Woods's fans will learn little of how he writes. Yachting enthusiasts will enjoy the racing segment but it's of modest interest to anyone else.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2022
In the early 1970s, before he became a best-selling writer of crime fiction, Woods took up sailing, eventually competing in a transatlantic race. In 1977, he published a memoir called Blue Water, Green Skipper that recounted his experiences during those years. His new autobiography includes that 200-page book in its entirety, as well as another nearly 300 pages of additional material covering his life leading up to the 1970s and his later years. Structurally, it's a traditional autobiography, starting with the birth of the author and taking us through his childhood, his time in the military, his career in advertising, his years as a sailor, and his writing career. The focus is on the sailing, though, with relatively little space devoted to his long run as a novelist (he's published nearly 90 books since 1981's Edgar-winning Chiefs). Woods treats his writing life almost as an afterthought; this is, in the main, a sailor's memoir. And it's a good one, too, with plenty of adventure. But it should be noted that readers looking to the book for the story of Woods the novelist might be disappointed.

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