[3] Journalist Philippa Toomey described him as a "talented and funny mimic with a gift for words and a stock of tales from the shaggy Express story to the grimmer side of international journalism.
[citation needed] Williams' British paperback publishers would claim that his first-hand experience of adventure and intrigue was put to superb use in his novels.
He was a delegate from Cambridge to the World Festival of Peace and Friendship in Warsaw, where he and some friends smuggled a Polish student to the West.
As a reporter he covered most of the world's trouble spots – Vietnam, the Middle-East, Algeria, Czechoslovakia, Ulster, Mozambique, Cyprus and Rhodesia.
[10] Subsequently, he had to be smuggled out of the country after the word barbouze (spy) had been written on his car,[5] In Beirut, he encountered Kim Philby[14] the day before the latter disappeared to Moscow.
Williams and his friend Nicholas Bethell went behind the Iron Curtain to obtain the manuscript from a go-between who had a signed document attesting that he was acting on Solzhenitsyn's behalf.
[19] According to several sources, Williams[20] smuggled the book out of Czechoslovakia, passing through the frontier post with the leaves spread out on his lap under a road map.
[25] Williams won immediate acclaim with his first novel: Long Run South was runner-up in the 1963 John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize[26] Noël Coward wrote in his diary, "I have read a thriller by my godson Alan Williams called Long Run South and it is really very good indeed.
The Sunday Times praised the exuberance and poetry in the writing which the reviewer noted was then very rare in British fiction.
"[30] British Book News said "Alan Williams is a thriller writer who has conspicuously succeeded in the rare feat of combining a novelist's art with a journalist's training.
"[31] The New York Times critic Martin Levin said, "If you were to ask me who were the top ten writers of intrigue novels, I would list Alan Williams among the first five.
Keating praised the "authentic feel" of his novels, adding "their pacy excitement derives from their author's writing skill.
"[35] And according to crime author Mike Ripley, "a good thriller can take you to an entirely foreign environment, as in the books of Alan Williams.
Dirk Bogarde had hoped to make a film of Barbouze co-starring Orson Welles with Bryan Forbes directing, but this came to nothing.