About the Author . . .
Wiley Russell was born in Greenville, Indiana in 1961. Seeking a warmer climate, his family (mother, father and one sister) soon moved to Arizona. After several years in the Phoenix/Tempe area, the family moved eighty miles north to the town of Payson to escape the big city rat race.
Besides the beautiful pine timber, Payson holds the distinction of being the location where the Grizzly Adams films and TV series were shot in the 70s with Dan Haggerty and Denver Pyle.
"I worked in a grocery store and actually got to sack their groceries one afternoon. Mr. Haggerty told me to ‘put the eggs on bottom.’ (I guess maybe that bear had mauled him one too many times.) But I was more excited by Denver Pyle, because Bonnie and Clyde is one of my favorite movies and it was cool to see ‘Sheriff Hamer’ standing right there.
After graduating from high school, and seeing his sister marry and move to Utah with her husband, the Russells moved to Arkansas where they’d be closer to both sides of the family tree, which dates to the 1700s in the area.
Wiley worked at a clothing factory in northern Arkansas that he says could only be described as something straight out of Norma Rae.
"The job was bad. Noise and heat. No windows. I think it was the vivid daydreams of walking through the plant with a flame-thrower and rocket launcher that first got me interested in writing action."
Wiley saved for a year to help pay for technical college and in 1980 he graduated with a diploma in computer programming from the Arkansas College of Technology in Little Rock.
Jobs being scarce, he went back to the clothing factory, but worked in the payroll department.
"Within days the flame-thrower idea was back and I knew I had to get out of there."
Meanwhile, his sister and brother-in-law were in the process of moving from Utah to Arkansas when they stopped for the night in western Oklahoma and discovered an oil boom going on.
The brother-in-law got work and convinced Wiley to move to Oklahoma. From 1981 to 1985 Wiley worked in the oil field, until a work slowdown got him laid off. In 1987 business picked up and he went back to work in the petroleum industry. In less than a year Wiley managed to get transferred to Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates right next to the Persian Gulf.
One of Wiley’s primary assignments was operating equipment off the coast of Bombay in the Indian Ocean. It was during one of these trips to Bombay that a young Indian roughneck showed him a newspaper article about a wanted Indian mafia boss who was living in Dubai (since there wasn’t any extradition) and how the Indian government was offering a sizable reward for his return.
Upon arrival back in Dubai, Wiley began planning to follow the mafia boss in a scheme to drug the man and smuggle him back to India in a dhow (ship).
"I was going to do it with one other friend. And since we’d pull it off without any guns or knives, just take him to the ground and chloroform him, I figured the worse the Arabs would do to us if we were caught was deport us back home. After all, the guy was a wanted mafia boss. But we’d both seen ‘Midnight Express,’ and the one in five chance of ending up in an Arab prison won out and the plan was scrapped. But the idea did serve as the catalyst for my third book ‘Bombay West.’"
In 1992 the company Wiley worked for reorganized and major management changes went into effect. At that time he planned to return to the States and write a travel memoir about his time in the Middle East. But before he could completely quit, he was offered a training position in Holland, which he accepted.
From 1992 to 1995 Wiley worked as an instructor in Holland. But was never really satisfied with the job or the location.
"The Dutch wouldn’t recognize my Dubai driver’s license, so I had to take two driving tests (written and practical). There must have been leftover Nazis running the Dutch DMV . . . the written part of the test meant studying over a thousand different scenarios in a book that was almost two-inches thick! Anyway, I failed the test after studying my butt off. Even so, I kept driving, but every time I got behind the wheel I was paranoid of having an accident and getting my car confiscated."
Wiley was in his mid-thirties and had seen enough of the oil field, so he returned to America. After taking a year off he began writing a travel memoir titled Sand Script: Strange Memoirs From the Middle East.
"Looking back, the book was a load of garbage. But it did help me write out the 100,000 or so bad words that every author has to go through."
Wiley’s second book was the novel Izard County Badlands. Followed by Bombay West (unpublished) and Out From Under the Porch (unpublished). In-between this time, he also wrote four screenplays and a number of short stories, some of which are award winners.
Currently he’s working on a sequel to Izard County Badlands titled Izard County: Full Auto.
