Robert Crais was born in 1954 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was adopted by his family and raised as an only child. His father was an oil worker and there were many police officers in his family. He was raised in Louisiana. He became interested in writing when, at the age of fifteen, he read the novel The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler. He is currently married to his wife, Pat, and has one daughter.

Robert Crais began his writing career in Los Angeles in the late seventies, where he wrote for such series as Hill Street Blues, Baretta, Miami Vice, Quincey, and Cagney and Lacey. The pinnacle of his script writing career was a mini series named Cross of Fire, which aired on NBC in 1989 and was about the Ku Klux Klan. His other notable script was the TV movie, In Self Defense, which he wrote in 1987.

At the peak of his career as a script writer, he began writing novels. He didn't have any success until after his father died in 1986. The death of his father inspired the main character in the novel he was writing, Elvis Cole. Cole is a lot like his namesake, Elvis Presley. He is charming, witty, clever and a stand-up kind of guy. He makes his first appearance in The Monkey's Raincoat. This was meant to be a stand-alone novel, but when Crais realized how popular Elvis Cole was, he decided to do a whole series of novels based on this character. Crais has written eleven Elvis Cole novels, featuring Cole and his partner, Joe Pike. He has written one novel with Pike as the main character and three novels that don't have Cole or Pike in them. One novel, Hostage, was made into a movie starring Bruce Willis.