Michael Greatrex Coney was born in Birmingham, England. After school, he began training as an accountant, then joined the Royal Air Force. In the 1960s, he became a father and returned briefly to accounting, but he disliked the work and decided to move his family to Antigua in the West Indies, where he managed a hotel and found writing was much easier. In 1969, his first story was published. In 1972 he and his family moved to British Columbia. The same year, he published his first novel, *Mirror Image*. He worked for the Forest Service while writing, although his fiction was not as successful after his move to Canada. He did write some nonfiction books about Vancouver and about boats that were successful. He retired from the Forest Service in the late 1980's, and died at the age 73 of pleural mesothelioma.