J. William Turner (aka James Turner) was born in Reading, England, forty miles west of London, in the late 1950's, and migrated with his family to south-eastern Australia in the mid 1960's.
The youngest of three children James spent the last seven years of his education at a boys' private school in the coastal city of Geelong. During his time here, he became a senior N.C.O. in the school's army cadet unit, having undergone basic, practical military training for promotion, on a regular army base for two weeks in 1971, as a fourteen-year-old, at the end of the nineth grade. After finishing the twelfth grade, he attended university to study science, but discontinued his course after two years.
In the early 1980's James gained his private pilot licence, was a volunteer operational member of St John Ambulance for ten years, and travelled to many parts of inland Australia and overseas, including two visits to the U.S.A.. He also penned the initial draft of Storm Ridge, the first of the four installments of Dangerous Days, in 1979, loosely based on a similar school hike he did in 1970 as an eighth-grader. Later, in 1989, Paddle Hard was drafted, based on an actual murder in Geelong in the mid 1970's, and his own experience at canoeing. Another ten years later, he drafted Outback Heroes after several visits to several parts of the vast Australian outback. Enemies Within was written just four years afterwards to give closure to the unanswered questions in Outback Heroes, and is set back in London, near to his ancestral roots. James has always liked putting pen to paper, and has had two articles published in Australian aviation magazines (1996 and 2008).
Over a six-month period from January to June, 2004, James wrote the first three stories of another, four-part, fictional autobiography, yet to be published, entitled Blades, about the traumatic and difficult teenage years of a 'top-gun' helicopter pilot named Julian. Set in the late 1990's, in Darwin, Melbourne, the central Australian outback, and southern California, Blades also reinroduces the three main child characters from Dangerous Days, now adults aged in their late-twenties, and their relationship with Julian. These three stories are entitled Street Kid, High Country, and California Dreaming. The final story, Aftermath, was completed in two-and-a-half months just midway through 2008, to bring Julian's life story almost to the present day.