Robert Boris Riskin

Bio

Many fiction writers have long been urged to get out of their ivory towers and research the real world for their material. Boris Riskin did better than that; he went out and actually worked for a living. A Brooklyn native, Riskin traveled the world. He lived in France twice, once on a honeymoon, again to attend the Sorbonne, both times to write…and write. After studying at the University of Michigan with playwright Kenneth Rowe, Riskin supported himself and family at a variety of jobs–from dishwasher to factory worker, busboy to a hawker of low price garments for high fashion women, all the while experiencing first hand the stuff of the human condition that feeds his writing.

Mr. Riskin’s work has appeared over the years in a variety of literary magazines, including The New Yorker, Texas Quarterly, Echo, and Hampton Shorts. Long an avid reader of mystery-thrillers, he finally decided to write one. The crackling result was Scrambled Eggs (2005), a taut thriller that introduced a salty new reluctant sleuth called Jake Wanderman, and an exciting new crime novelist called Boris Riskin.

Riskin now lives and writes in Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island, where the bay and ocean are close enough to touch, he says, and the air is alive with stories. Jake Wanderman lives there too, back in action now as the Shakespeare-quoting anti-hero of Mr. Riskin’s new autopsy of the art world, Deadly Bones (2008).