Richard Frere was born at Roydon Hall, Norfolk, in 1922. When Frere was a child, his father moved to Scotland and after private tutoring he went to Inverness Academy. He instinctively took to the Highlands, and over the course of his life he published a number of works on the area as well as on a variety of other subjects, however, he would probably have remained unknown to the wider world had it not been for his association with Gavin Maxwell and the publication of Maxwell's Ghost in 1976. He died in 1999.