Richard Rayner is the co-creator of Knightfall, an upcoming historical drama on the History Channel, with fellow creator Don Handfield. Knightfall tells the story of Templar leader Sir Landry, a brave knight discouraged by the Templar’s failures during the Crusades, who is reinvigorated by news that the Holy Grail has appeared. The series will premiere this fall.
Adept in multi genres, Rayner is a novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, journalist, screenwriter, and producer. His first novel, Los Angeles Without a Map, was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie. L.A. Without a Map (for which Rayner co-wrote the screenplay with director Mika Kaurismäki) starred David Tennant, Vinessa Shaw, Julie Delpy, Vincent Gallo, and, in an uncredited part, Johnny Depp.
In 1996, Rayner published The Blue Suit, a memoir about his early life that won an Esquire Nonfiction Award in the UK, and was described as ‘a beguiling portrait of the artist as a writer and a crook’ by the New York Times. Novels like The Cloud Sketcher and Devil’s Wind followed. Murder Book, another novel, grew out of a time that Rayner spent riding with the Los Angeles Police Department, while Drake’s Fortune was inspired by the great con artist, Oscar Hartzell. In 2009, Rayner published A Bright and Guilty Place, a non-fiction historical narrative set in Los Angeles in the late 1920s and early 1930s, featuring various true-life tabloid crimes of the era.
He has written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, The Times, The Guardian, The Observer and Granta Magazine among others. He was also an editor at Time Out Magazine, in London, and later on the literary magazine Granta, then based in Cambridge. He wrote about the Los Angeles Riots for Granta Magazine, and about the post-Rodney-King Los Angeles Police Department for the New York Times Magazine. His non-fiction work for The New Yorker has included a profile of Robert Redford, and a story about how a Finnish entomologist helped put leaves back on pest-ravaged Beijing trees in time for the 2008 Olympics. Richard Rayner was born on December 15, 1955, in the northern city of Bradford.
He attended schools in Yorkshire and Wales before studying philosophy and law at the University of Cambridge. His work has been translated into many languages. He lives in Santa Monica with his wife, Päivi Suvilehto, and their two sons and two cats.