Robert Syd Hopkins

This is a look into a writer's life and some of the books, films, and television that were born of it.

Robert Syd Hopkins is the author of twelve books – three non-fiction works and nine novels – under his own name and the pen-name, Robert Rostand. His books have been translated into eleven languages.

Of his novels, three have become feature-length movies, two from screenplays by Hopkins, both international coproductions, and filmed respectively in France and Hungary. In addition he has authored original screenplays for Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. Plus written multiple-episodes for two U.S. television series filmed in Canada, RoboCop and F/​X, both based on feature films.

Hopkins was born and grew up in a small blue-collar town south of Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA, not in English but Geography, and earned a Master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma, not irrelevant for what was to follow.

The Hopkins’ were Welsh, from Swansea. His grandfather Roger Thomas Hopkins built and ran copper smelters, an occupation that suited his wanderlust. “Before my father Syd was 14 years old,” says Hopkins, “the family had trekked along on Roger Thomas’s migratory adventures from Canada (where Syd was born) to Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Mexico during its revolution. They finally came to rest in Clarkdale, Arizona where my grandfather ran the smelter in nearby Jerome.”

His mother Irene’s family were Boston Irish. They moved to the west coast when Irene was still a child. At eighteen she met her future husband, Syd, now an electrician, working in the same factory.

Says Hopkins, “I don’t know if it’s owed the Hopkins DNA (my Welsh grandmother thought so), or the stories my mother Irene read to her young unruly boy-child that took me into the words and worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. By whatever provenance, I’ve lived, worked, and traveled beyond the borders of the United States the majority of my adult life. It was inevitable that what the poet Lawrence Durrell called ‘the spirit of place’ and the experiences of an American steeping in various foreign cultures would find its way into nearly everything I’ve written -- books, films, and episodic television."

After briefly teaching geography at the University of Hawaii, Hopkins ended up with the International Division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company. First as international sales manager then, still in his 20s, manager of South America with a move to Rio. As with teaching, climbing the corporate ladder wasn’t a comfortable fit and he resigned to stay on in tumultuous Rio, filling notebooks with ideas and characters for a crack at a novel. Running out of money and on a tip from a pal in New York, he got wind of a job in London. For Hopkins London changed everything, that phrase from the biologist Louis Pasteur prophetic: that chance favors the prepared mind.

In those dark London mornings before his day job editing copy for a design and marketing group, he began the first novel, a thriller set in Rio during Carnival... pure pulp... that would eventually make its way into print as The Vengeance Run (Berkeley Medallion). “Ah, but the things you learn from writing that first novel,” Hopkins recalls. And chance was just warming up.

On the return from his first visit to the south of France aboard the cross-channel ferry from Calais to Folkstone, Hopkins meets a young Aussie lady named Megan, studying pharmacy in London. By the time they step from the train at Victoria station a few hours later they both knew their lives had taken a turn. “Megan and I were joined at the hip for the next seven years, much of it in London. She was smart, funny, and in her way calming... something I wasn’t much used to in my life. We had a terrific time.”

In their first 30 months together, writing full time now, Hopkins finished three novels all to be published plus a non-fiction book for and about Americans living abroad. Megan was a major part of it all. But early on there was still a career element missing from the equation.

Until New York and a visit to the Greenwich Village apartment of a former colleague at McGraw-Hill. Across the hall was a writer who introduced Hopkins to Knox Burger, editor-in-chief of the legendary pulp-fiction publisher, Fawcett Gold Medal. When Knox left to become an agent a few months later, Hopkins was among his first clients. “Knox was a tough editor,” Hopkins remembers, “and his mantra was it all starts with character. Knox Burger taught me more about how to write than anyone. His 'no-mercy' coaching letters, laced with a barbed wit, always went straight to the heart of whatever was needed to better tell the story. On the agency letterhead was a motto only partly in jest... "honest prose, nerves of steel."

In the writing game, then and now, things worth aspiring to.

Click on "Works" above to learn more about the books and film writing.