This set the wheels in motion for Alex, and with the annual Country and Western Festival a couple of months away - a weekend full of wannabe Buffalo Bills, Wyatt Earps and Billy The Kids, all with fake guns strapped to their hips - it would be the perfect setting for a murder mystery he thought.Īlex found no difficulty in finding a title for his novel. While spending some time at the Kelburne bar, sampling a small libation and chatting to his good friend and owner, Eddie Hughes and a few of the regulars, someone had mentioned there had never been a recorded murder on Millport.
So where did the idea come from? Alex has spent a lot of time on Millport, an island on the west-coast of Scotland, where the novel is set.
The move from non-fiction football writing to novel writing might seem like an unlikely shift, but Alex says ‘I had been brought up on a staple diet of Agatha Christie (mixed in with a mountain of football autobiographies and biographies) and I just can’t get enough of extremely clever mystery writers.’ In 2016, the second book in the series, What Spooked Crazy Horse was published. This was the beginning of the Millport set, mystery series that would follow Charlie Brock - a former sports journalist, turned detective. Despite being warned against fiction writing by some publishers, Alex was already well on his way, with his first novel, Who Shot Wild Bill, published in 2013. After an already successful writing career, he had the idea for a whodunnit novel, which sparked the main character, Charlie Brock. Ringwood’s author Alex Gordon, started out as a sports editor of the Scottish Sunday Mail, as well as writing twelve non-fiction football books.