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 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, his first novel(book one and two)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, 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.

In his third novel -a crime/historical fiction novel written together with prolific crime writer Tony Nash it is called Hardrada's Hoard and is set in Norfolk, England and Norway.

Now his fourth novel is titled A Tengu's Tale and tells the story of what happens when an English ship's captain is marooned in Japan during the country's period of self-imposed isolationism at a time when any foreigner caught in Japan risked being executed.

Educating Slaves is a darkly comic account of an English Lord's attempt to educate some slaves shipwrecked on the Norfolk coast and to sell them on as maids, butlers and governesses whilst unbeknown to him there lurks a highly educated doctor, linguist mass murderer and drug pusher amongst the slaves, demanding his own "place in the sun"

Finally,and what most people have been waiting for is the author's bizarre life stories set in two books and called simply Fifty Two. From smuggling whisky to Korea,being a stowaway from South Africa to England,getting shot in Brazil,teaching in Iran or translator in a Sydney prison,these tales are only the tip of the iceberg and told in Downing's unique and chatty style almost makes one believes he/she is standing next to him in the famed "Silver Penis" bar.