EX-PAT WRITER: A longtime resident of England, Doust was widely praised for his sportswriting.

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Dudley Doust ’52: ‘Maigret of Sportswriters’

I first met sports journalist and writer Dudley Doust when he interviewed me for the Sunday Times, for whom he was chief sports writer, in 1977. We got on so well, Dudley asking naïve, American questions about cricket from a basis of a deep interest in the psychology of sport, and then writing so excellent a piece, that when someone suggested I write a book about the series of international matches against Australia during that summer, the person I immediately thought of to help me was Doust.

Thus an improbable literary alliance, and a lifelong friendship, began. We wrote two books together. He was much more than a ghost. The books included chapters by him, including a marvelous portrait described as “still the best reconstruction of an innings ever done; no one ever got inside the head of a batsman like that.”

Dudley brought to English sportswriting techniques learned from Tom Wolfe and American journalism. He taught me, as he did many others, a lot about writing. I learned the difference between an academic essay and a good read. I learned how all sorts of details—most stereotypically, what someone had for breakfast before a big game—could throw light on the person in unexpected ways.

He later published further books about sportsmen, and a collection of pieces, Sports Beat, whose foreword stated: “Doust is the Maigret of sportswriters, gently but doggedly working on the case until the blinding light of revelation comes.”

In recent years he wrote pithy letters to the newspapers, including one written after Conservative losses in local elections: “Sir, the Tories’ problem is simply explained. Their message is getting through.”

Doust was born in Syracuse, studied at Rochester, and after pursuing journalism at Stanford University became a reporter with the Kansas City Star. Later he worked as foreign correspondent for Time, stationed in London between 1960 and 1961 (where he met his wife, Jane, a painter and horseback rider), and then in Mexico City.

The Dousts married in Mexico but lived almost all their lives together in England, mostly in rural Somerset.

He latterly found himself subject to writer’s block, notably in his unfinished book on Westbrook, a small stream running alongside his house. When he died, he had written 35,000 words but doubted whether it was worth finishing; his friends hope to ensure that the book will be published.

It was a typically Doust project, in the conviction—psychoanalytical, I would say—that a small thing linked to many big things, so that the buildings, projects, personalities, and class conflicts that had hugged the course of the Westbrook over the centuries would, when viewed synoptically, turn out to reveal a whole social history in miniature.

Doust died January 13 at the age of 77.

He was a kindly, lovable, funny, thoughtful, and gritty man. He was always open to ideas and people of all sorts. He was very much a family man and will be widely missed.

—Michael Brearley

Michael Brearley is a psychoanalyst, part-time writer, and ex-cricketer. This essay is adapted from an obituary that appeared in the Guardian on January 25, 2008.