Richard Mason, the son of an electrical engineer, was born near Manchester in 1919. He was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset and then worked on a film magazine and for the British Council. During World War II he spent a year learning Japanese under the auspices of the RAF at SOAS before serving in the Far East as an interrogator of Japanese prisoners-of-war. At this time he wrote his first novel, The Wind Cannot Read; he did his writing in the evenings, often in temperatures of over 100 degrees, and afterwards carried the manuscript in his jeep all through the Burma Campaign. His most famous novel is The World of Suzie Wong.
