Russell James suffered an author's conventionally unhappy childhood: his father committed suicide and the three-year-old Russell and his mother lived in one room in a clifftop house owned by wicked relatives. At the age of ten, Russell was sent away to military boarding school, en route for a career in the army. He broke away to spend the 1960s bumming around, working in radio in Cyprus, then in theatre in the UK, as actor, director, lighting engineer and stagehand. James became respectable in the 1970s, marrying, working for IBM, then holding a white-collar managerial job for seven years. He threw his new respectability over in 1979 to write full-time.