Russell Lucas

Background

Russell Lucas was born on January 11, 1930, in Bombay, India. He was the son of Albert Newlands, a Deputy Chief Commissioner of the police. After spending his first years of childhood in India, Lucas moved to England with his mother after she divorced and married an Englishman, James Lucas, a fireman, whose surname Russell took.

Education

Russell attended Christ Church School in Bombay.

Career

Russell Lucas came to the United Kingdom in 1946 and did his National Service in the East Lancashire Regiment from 1948 to 1949. Returning to Bombay, he worked as a traveling salesman for the family business, which manufactured batteries under the brand names Eagle, for cars, and Lion, for lorries. Russell soon returned to the United Kingdom and a lucrative job as a banking manager and treasury executive at Vauxhall Motors to better support his family. He worked for this company from 1956 to 1987 before taking early retirement to write fiction.

Having written stories since the age of eight, Russell Lucas successfully entered literary competitions the New Statesman, the Spectator, and Punch, before becoming an author. His short stories and novels, set during the Raj era, are characterized by their satire, black humor, and accounts of sexual exploits, often between Englishmen and Indians, and are flavored by the author's love of India and mistrust of the English occupational forces. Having grown up in Bombay, where Russell's father was Deputy Chief Commissioner of the police, Lucas drew on his experience of India for his first book, Evenings at Mongini's and Other Stories, a collection of robustly humorous short stories, chiefly about sex. The title story concerned two upper-class Indian women who dissatisfied in their idleness, pick up a couple of chauffeurs from the Soviet Embassy, and have brief affairs with them. They were not the only examples in the collection of seemingly exploited women quietly exploiting their menfolk. Another story, set in the days of the pre-war Raj, was about an attractive 40-year-old woman who leaves the United Kingdom to accompany her increasingly boozy and boring husband to his new appointment as Bombay director of his firm. Russell's book, Lip Service: An Oedipal Fable, is chronicling the rake's progress of the son of a man-eating mother. Again the focus was on the sex lives of the protagonists. In 1993, Lucas published his second novel, The Ice Factory, set in Bombay, during the last days of the Raj, and concerning the seemingly endless sexual shenanigans of the unfortunate Chutrivala family; again it was warmly received by critics.

Achievements

• Russell Lucas was particularly well known for writing novels and stories set in India during the British Raj. His books were translated into several languages. Russell contributed stories to anthologies and periodicals and won the 1995 Stand International Award for best short story at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature for the story Space.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lip Service

    (Depicts the life of Lazlo Horvath as he is thrust into th...)

    1991
  • Evenings at Mongini's and Other Stories 1990
  • Le Salon de massages et autres nouvelles 1992
  • Ice Factory 1992

Connections

Russell Lucas married June Acland in 1950. They had three children: two sons and a daughter.

Father:

Albert Newlands

At one time, the most highly decorated police officer in the British Empire, Albert Newlands, was also a welterweight boxing champion of India, sprint cycle champion of India, and a champion swimmer.

Wife:

June Acland