Murray, William, 1926-2005

American novelist and columnist for The New Yorker magazine, William Murray was born in New York City on April 8, 1926; lived in Italy with his mother until the age of eight; graduated from Harvard University; served in the Army Air Force; and pursued a career as a writer. He worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker beginning in 1956; published numerous novels, magazine articles, essays, reviews, and television scripts; and produced a mystery series set at the Del Mar (Calif.) racetrack that included Tip on a Dead Crab (1985) and When the Fat Man Sings (1987). Murray died in 2005.

Biographical/Historical note

William Murray, born in New York City on April 8, 1926, was the only child of William Murray, head of the New York branch of William Morris talent agency and Danesi Murray, an Italian actress, opera singer, and publisher. At age 6 months, after his parents divorced, Murray moved with his mother to Rome, Italy; he returned to the United States at the age of 8. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy from 1942-1943, and, after graduating, he enrolled at Harvard, where he developed his interest in opera and singing. After college, he spent time in the Army Air Force and qualified for the GI Bill. He returned to Italy shortly after to pursue his opera career; when he lost his voice temporarily, he turned to fiction and journalism. Already a freelance writer and a stringer for TIME, he acquired his first professional job in the fiction department at the THE NEW YORKER in 1956 and continued as a staff writer for more than thirty years.

Murray married Doris Rogers in 1952, settled in New York, and then relocated to Rome at the end of 1961. Already a regular contributor to The New Yorker with the "Letter from Italy" column, he then published Fugitive Romans (1954) and Best Seller (1957). By 1966, the Murray family, with two daughters and a son, moved to California, settling in Malibu and then Del Mar. He and Doris Rogers divorced in 1972; he married Alice Bigbee in 1975.

Murray's parents had divorced in 1936, shortly after his mother began an almost forty-year relationship with Janet Flanner, American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker . In Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray, published in 2000, Murray tells the story of the relationship between his mother and Flanner who helped raised him during his teenage years.

After moving to California, Murray wrote his noted mystery series set at the Del Mar racetrack, featuring his characters, "Shifty Lou Anderson" and his gambler sidekick "Jay Fox" with Tip on a Dead Crab (1985), When the Fat Man Sings (1987), The King of the Nightcap (1989), I'm Getting Killed Right Here (1991), Now You See Her, Now You Don't (1994), and A Fine Italian Hand (1996).

Murray contributed to more than thirty magazines and newspapers on travel, horseracing, gambling, and California lifestyle. He also published books and articles on Italy and Italian culture with Italy: The Fatal Gift (1982) and The Last Italian: Portrait of a People (1991). Murray also wrote plays, including translations of Luigi Pirandello's "Naked"; essays; reviews of theatre and music; and television scripts.

William Murray died March 9, 2005, in Manhattan.