Richard Prather was born in Santa Ana, California. In 1940-41 he spent a year at Riverside Junior College (now Riverside Community College). He served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, from 1942 through the end of the war in 1945. In 1945 he married Tina Hager and took a job as a civilian clerk at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. He left that that job to become a full-time writer in 1949. The first Shell Scott mystery, "Case of the Vanishing Beauty" was published in 1950. Prather had a disagreement with his publisher Pocket Books and sued them in 1975. He gave up writing for several years and grew avocados. In 1986 he returned with The Amber Effect. His final book, Shellshock (1987) was published by Tor Books.