In his teens, he joined the punk scene and moved to Camden Town to live in a squat and play in bands.
[1] After discovering the works of Elmore Leonard he began writing book reviews for NME and The Sunday Times.
[2] In 1994, Williams published Into the Badlands (1991), a combination of travelogue and interviews with American crime fiction authors, including Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, Carl Hiaasen, and Sara Paretsky.
This was followed in 1994 by Bloody Valentine, a nonfiction account of the killing of sex worker Lynette White in the inner-city district of Butetown.
It became the first volume in the so-called 'Cardiff Trilogy', which includes the novels Cardiff Dead (2000) and The Prince of Wales (2003).