Bio
Bryan Christy’s first job was as a mortician’s apprentice in his family’s funeral home. He is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Cornell's FALCON Japanese Program, the University of Michigan Law School, and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Tokyo University Law School. He passed the CPA and bar exams and worked as a lawyer in Washington, DC, including in the Executive Office of the President. As a lawyer he advised on such topics as relations with Libya, U.S.-Japan supercomputer trade, and the sale of light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea…
This all sounds as self-important as I once hoped it would so I’ll tell you directly that growing up in and around a funeral home teaches you that a plastic sheet and a cold table are just around the corner no matter what you do with your life. There was no sense, I realized, dressing up for them in my thirties. I had gone to law school because I was afraid to be a writer. I quit law at age 32 to write full time. I planned to start with something easy, a formulaic thriller in the mold of John Grisham’s so I could earn some money to do some “real” writing, and learned then how difficult even “simple” plotting could be. It turned out that writing was just like everything else, if you were going to be good at it you couldn’t fake it.
I had grown up listening to life stories told to organ music, the air heavy with the smell of gladiolas and embalming fluid. I loved those stories, and I loved the real live characters who told them. The lawyer in me loved to get to the bottom of things. An uncle, ex-SWAT and one of the FBI's pioneer longterm undercover agents, took me under his wing. “The good guys aren’t always right, and the bad guys aren’t always what you expect,” was one of his first lessons. Not only were there plenty of true stories out there that were stranger than fiction, there were ways of telling them that had been poorly explored. To find people and principles in opposition, to inhabit opposing value systems for extended periods of time without judgment, was an approach to writing that promised a life of adventure.
The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers is my first book.
