Charles W. Runyon
Personal Information
Description
Charles Runyon was born in Sheridan, Missouri, and was raised on his parents' farm. He found a love of writing at an early age, and in high school was already preparing to be a professional writer. He ran away from home at age 16 to work on a ranch in West Texas. He served with the U.S. Army in the Korean War. He married in 1957, and he and his wife honeymooned travelling on a motorcycle in Mexico, an experience he later used in his novel The Death Cycle (1963). His first published short story, “First Man in a Satellite” appeared in Super Science Fiction in 1958. When his short stories started selling, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, and wrote his first novel, The Anatomy of Violence (1960), in a borrowed lakeside cabin. When it was finished he took his family to the West Indies, then returned to New York. He wrote both science fiction and crime fiction, but when his brother was murdered in 1967, he lost his love for crime fiction and focused primarily on science fiction. After the publication of The Gypsy King in 1980, he took a break from writing, and earned a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. He currently lives in Texas.
Books
I, Weapon
To create the man named Raki, Earth had broken its most rigid taboos against interbreeding. His grandparents were a four-foot tall female genius; a rapacious, blue-skinned space brigand; an enormous superstud gladiator with long, silky fur; and a bland telepathic huntress. His parents were the most gifted creatures ever to walk the Earth--until Raki was born to surpass even them.
The vengeance man
Collects three crime novels originally published by Gold Medal Books. The vengeance man: After Jim Wilson murders his wife and her lover in a fleabag motel, he gets off on a technicality and launches a campaign of terror against the small town he believes betrayed him. Park Avenue tramp: During one of her blackouts, Charity McAdams Farnese walks into a downtown bar named Duo's and into the life of Joe Doyle, second-rate piano player. But Charity's husband has had enough of her cheating ways. The prettiest girl I ever killed: Accidents happen, but the town of Sherman seems to have more than its fair share of the fatal kind. Someone falls into a well, another drowns, another is killed by an exploding stove. Curt Friedland comes back to town to clear his brother of murder, convinced there is more to all these deaths than mere coincidence.
The Death Cycle
Story of two couples, one on the death cycle, running from the law, trying to make the Mexican border.