Author Biographies

Gordon Ryan was born in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Thomas Ryan and Eleanor Hansen. He is the second generation of Irish and Norwegian grandparents. He spent his early years in Staten Island, New York; his middle childhood years in Tampa, Florida; and his teenage junior high and high school years in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Political Science and has completed graduate work in Public Administration. As a young man of nineteen, Gordon served with the 1st Recon Battalion, United States Marine Corps. Several years later, he served with the United States Air Force during the Vietnam conflict where he was assigned to a medical facility in Bangkok.

Gordon has lived overseas for many years in Norway, England, Thailand, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Ireland. He was assigned to the American Embassy in Dublin in the tumultuous mid-70s. He has also lived in a half dozen states on both the east and west coasts of America, including the far reaches of Alaska.

After twenty-five years of municipal administration with appointments as City Manager in Washington State and Alaska, and local government and electric utility management experience in California and Utah, Gordon is currently working as a consultant to local governments and other organizations. He wrote his first novel in 1993 while living in New Zealand, as he now recalls it, "… to do something new and different before I turned fifty." Despite the early morning reluctance to get out of bed, a hectic schedule that Gordon (and thousands of other writers) find necessary to assure a daily quiet time to write, once the writing bug took hold, "… I wondered why I hadn't discovered the joys of creating fiction many years earlier."

Following the publication of Dangerous Legacy, Gordon hit his stride and jumped to the best seller list with the phenomenal Threads of Honor, a true story of an incredible American flag and the American space program. That success was followed by a robust family saga in three volumes entitled Spirit of Union, the historical chronicle of a feisty Irish immigrant to New York and a Norwegian girl whose family had joined the LDS church and was destined for Utah.

The first words that eventually became Dangerous Legacy have now expanded to six published novels, two additional manuscripts with Mapletree Publishing Company and "more stories in my head than I will ever have time to write," he says. He continues to write almost daily, describing his role as a published novelist as "one of the more fulfilling experiences of my life."

Gordon passed away on November 14, 2012. AML has posted a wonderful memorial here.