Education
Born near Manchester, he was educated in Dorset, then worked first on a film magazine and later for the British Council. Mason's first novel was The Wind Cannot Read (1946), finished during the Burma Campaign.
Born near Manchester, he was educated in Dorset, then worked first on a film magazine and later for the British Council. Mason's first novel was The Wind Cannot Read (1946), finished during the Burma Campaign.
His novels usually concerned Britons' experiences in exotic foreign locations, especially in Asia. The Second World War gave him a chance to learn Japanese, and he became an interrogator of prisoners of war. Richard and Felicity Mason separated in 1958 and were later divorced.
It was based partly on his wartime experiences learning Japanese. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1958 film version, starring Dirk Bogarde. His novel The Shadow and the Peak, set in Jamaica, was filmed in 1958 as Passionate Summer (alternately titled "Storm over Jamaica").
He also produced films and wrote several scripts. With W.P. Lipscomb, he wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film version of Nevil Shute's novel "A Town Like Alice." Mason's 1962 espionage novel The Fever Tree was set in India and Nepal. Mason's observations while living in Hong Kong inspired him to write his best-known book, The World of Suzie Wong (1957), a tale of an artist's surprisingly tender romance with a Hong Kong prostitute.
It became a bestseller and added a somewhat controversial expression, "Suzie Wong" (a seductive East Asian woman), to the English language. It was adapted into a 1958 Broadway play starring William Shatner and France Nuyen, and the 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. It was Kwan's first film role.
Mason, a cigarette smoker, died of throat cancer in Rome, Italy, where he had lived for nearly 40 years.
(This is a Spanish language edition translated by N. Moral...)