Robert Fate's Bio

ROBERT FATE is my pen name. The name on my birth certificate is Robert Fate Bealmear. I'm a Marine Corps veteran who lived in Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, and can mangle the French language with the best of them. I worked as an oilfield rough neck on a Texaco rig in Northeastern Oklahoma and a TV cameraman in Oklahoma City, jobs not as dissimilar as you might think. I was a fashion model in New York City for a few years to earn a living while I co-authored a stage play with my buddy Don Chastain. We never sold it. I was a project manager and later a sales exec in Las Vegas after working as a chef in a Los Angeles restaurant, where Gourmet Magazine asked for my Gingerbread recipe - actually, it was my grandmother's recipe. Along the way, I owned a company that airbrushed flowers on silk for the garment industry, and then I wrote scripts for the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. With the support and encouragement of Bruce Cook, a good friend, I produced an independent feature film. As a Hollywood special effects technician, I won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement.

I share a hillside house above Silver Lake in Los Angeles with Fern, a yoga enthusiast and ceramic artist, and my wife since 1975. In the spring of 2010, our fabulous daughter Jenny graduated cum laude from USC with degrees in Biology and French. Our dog's name is Alonzo, our cat's names are Opie and Nanda, and we call our turtle Pharrell.

There are four books in the Baby Shark series, and I am presently writing number five. Most recently, I finished a stand-alone entitled Kill the Gigolo. It is a contemporary, third person, nasty little piece of noir with a male protagonist. Kill the Gigolo will be in bookstores soon.

I am a member of the Writers Guild of America, west, and the Los Angeles and National chapters of Sisters in Crime.

Contact me at robert-fate@sbcglobal.net. Many do, and I always answer.

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