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Like a character from one of her 18 books, Berry's life has been stranger than fiction. Eleanor Berry is of Welsh ancestry but was born and bred in London where she has lived nearly all her life.
Her first brush with the literary scene occured when she broke windows in Ian Fleming's house at the age of eight.
She was schooled at Godstowe and Wycombe Abbey. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris, but stormed out of a lecture hall, disgusted by the lecturer's statement that Madame Bovary's problems would only have been solved, had she got down on her hands and knees, scrubbing floors.
She returned to England and went to university, where she obtained a BA Hons degree in English. While at University, she completed an unpublished contextual thesis on the Marquis de Sade. In her spare time, she wrote a grossly indecent book entitled "The Story of Paddy" which she had the good sense to burn and inadvertently set a garage on fire.
Youngest daughter of the late Lord Hartwell, former editor in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and maternal grand-daughter of barrister and Lord Chancellor F.E Smith, Berry formed a controversial 23 year friendship with the late Mirror magnate Robert Maxwell.
Devastated by his death in November 1991, she recounts their unusual friendship in her humourous eulogy, "Cap'n Bob and me: The Robert Maxwell I knew.".
Renowned for her black comedies she is known to the inhabitants of Manchester as "that lovely lass from London!", and to her Russian readers, as reviewed in the Russian magazine Minuta as being "almost a reincarnation of our own belvoved Dostoievsky".
The works of Gorky, Dostoievsky, Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and James Hadley Chase have strongly influenced her writings.
Since leaving university, she first worked as a commercial translator, using French and Russian. After that, she tried her hand at verbal interpretation in hospitals, but lost her head by shouting at the parties concerned, and to quote her own words, was "bunged out".
Then she worked as a research assistant to the late Dr Victor Ratner, a Harley Street specialist who died suspiciously and mysteriously. Since then she has worked intermittently as a research assistant to other members of the medical profession.
For a short time, she did voluntary work and read Dostoievsky to the blind. She discontinued this abruptly when a 96 year old woman mistook her voice for that of her 75 year old son. She now spends most of her time as a writer and freelance journalist.
Her interests, among others, include clairvoyants, amateur piano playing, Russian literature, Russian folk songs, sensational court cases, the Krays, IRA pubs, Irish rebel songs, Jack the Ripper and the sight of men who wear their ties loosened at the neck.
A film of one of her books, which she will not name, is being made into a film. Her books "Your Father Died on the Gallows" and "The Ruin of Jesse Cavendish" are both available in Russian. Eleanor Berry has signed a contract to have her other books translated into Russian, as well. She has frequently appeared on television and radio, including Radio California.
