Background
Greenan grew up in the Bronx, had a tour of duty in the US Navy, and after attending Long Island University on the G.I. Bill, went to live in Boston in the early 1950s. For several years he worked as a traveling salesman selling industrial machine parts in remote corners of New England. His savings enabled him to travel to Nice, France where he stayed for a year to write. On his return to Boston he married Flora Bratko and opened an antique shop in Harvard Square naming it The Cat and Racquet after the story by Honoré de Balzac.The business was short-lived, but the experience provided an abundance of material for his subsequent career as a writer. In 1966, by then aged 40, he left his job as a ball bearing sales manager and traveled with his wife and three children to return to Nice with the intention of taking a year to finish a novel. This work was eventually published by Random House in 1968 titled It Happened in Boston? to significant acclaim.
Greenan maintained his career as an author by dividing his time between Europe and the U.S.A. and concentrating exclusively on writing novel-length works. His fiction appeared in a magazine on only one occasion, when an excerpt from his sixth book The Bric-a-Brac Man featured in Playboy along with Alex Haley's book Roots. To date ten novels by Russell H. Greenan have been published in the U.S.A. and France. Over 40 different editions of these novels have appeared in five languages.
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