Frank Riley's life has been one adventure after another. As a fifteen-year-old kid he worked on river boats in the River Mersey, Liverpool. At sixteen, he went into the Merchant Navy and served on nine ships. When he was eighteen he began hitch-hiking through Scandinavia and mainland Europe. At twenty he worked on schooners in the Mediterranean, then hitch-hiked twice through Europe and the Middle East. He ran out of money on the first attempt to get to Australia in Karachi and ended up getting a job as a third cook on a Norwegian freighter which took him to India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the USA and Antwerp in Belgium. The second attempt to get to Australia (to see his brother) he ran out of money in Teheran in Iran and had to do a runner out of that country with the financial assistance of his brother. He's a brown belt in judo, and has done some boxing and karate. He spent twenty-two years as a professional ballroom and Latin American dancer and became a judge in both American style and international. He began writing over forty years ago and has written numerous novels and movie scripts and has recently teamed up with Amazon.com to sell his books. He currently has three titles for sale: two novels, 'Bell's Lot' a detective drama set in Sydney, and 'The last Dance', a romance drama set in the cauldron of the dance world. His third title is 'The Life of Riley, a tongue-in-cheek autobiography'. His motivation for writing, he says: "is from life itself. I draw on my past, but I rely heavily on my observations of people and their motivations. I don't subscribe to the notion that people really change their character during their life - the so-called 'arc' in movie parlance - and it is that belief in the basic flaw of humans that gives me much fodder for my works." He wrote and directed a pilot for a children's television series, called 'The Magician'. It was a vehicle for showing the difficulties children have in growing up. The pilot dealt with bullying. Sadly, the television station, for which he wrote and directed his work, went belly up whilst they were in post production.
