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Richard Downing
Richard Downing has lived and worked for thirty years in France, Germany, Norway, Iran, South Africa, Hong Kong, Brazil, South Korea, Australia and Japan. During this time he has h...view moreRichard Downing has lived and worked for thirty years in France, Germany, Norway, Iran, South Africa, Hong Kong, Brazil, South Korea, Australia and Japan. During this time he has had many unique jobs such as smuggler (Japan to Korea) movie extra (Revenge of the Pink Panther) translator/interpreter (Sydney prison) fashion model (Japan and Hong Kong), disc jockey, bus conductor, fruit juice seller on a nudist beach (South Africa) tallyman (on Cape Town harbour) dishwasher in the red-light area of Hamburg, Germany, manager of the first Kentucky Fried Chicken in Durban, South Africa, strawberry picker (Norway) and grape picker (France) landlord (England) English instructor to the Shah of Iran's Air force (Teheran) and his last job was deputy headmaster at a specialist school for bullied and traumatized children. He is married to a Japanese cooking instructor and lives in Norwich, England.The Devil's Tattoo is his first novel and is set in Japan and is a novel about a surviving kamikaze pilot and his rise and fall in the world of the yakuza.Gaijin House is his second novel and is a set of individual stories and a whimsical look at the world of a group of foreigners living in a fetid,cockroach infested hovel in Osaka,Japan and one which the landlady wants demolished to cash in on the property boom.Refusing to leave she brings in some thugs to force them out.The stories are all culled from Downing's twenty six years spent in Osaka.Eighty percent of the stories are true with ten percent being a blend of fiction and fact and the final ten percent being completely fiction.Gaijin House also contains ten pen ank ink drawings from the well known illustrator Howard Clarke.He has just released his third novel Hardrada's Hoard -a crime/historical novel, written together with prolific crime writer Tony Nash.view less