GORDON, Alison (Ruth) 1943-

PERSONAL: Born January 19, 1943, in New York, NY; daughter of John King (an editor) and Ruth (an editor; maiden name, Anderson) Gordon; married Paul Bennett (an attorney), October 2, 1982. Education: Attended Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1960-65. Politics: Social Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—84 Hogarth Ave., Toronto, Ontario M4K 1K4, Canada.

CAREER: Radio and television broadcaster and writer for Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1973-78; Toronto Star, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, baseball reporter, 1979-86; freelance writer, 1986—.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Magazine Award of Canada humor category runner-up, 1978; National Newspaper Awards (Canada) special award, 1979, for sports writing.

WRITINGS:

"KATE HENRY" SERIES; MYSTERY NOVELS

The Dead Pull Hitter, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Safe at Home: A Kate Henry Mystery, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Night Game: A Kate Henry Mystery, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1992, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Striking Out: A Kate Henry Mystery, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

Prairie Hardball, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997, McClelland & Stewart/Tundra Books (Plattsburgh, NY), 1998.

OTHER

Foul Balls: Five Years in the American League, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1984, published as Foul Ball!: Five Years in the American League, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1985.

Contributor to Slightly Higher in Canada, edited by Sean Kelly and Ted Mann, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1978; and A Toronto Lampoon, edited by Wayne Grigsby, Eden (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1984.

SIDELIGHTS: Alison Gordon is a former sports writer who turned mystery novelist in the late 1980s. Initially working in television and radio, she happened into a career writing about the Toronto Blue Jays for the Toronto Star newspaper. Her first book, the nonfiction Foul Balls: Five Years in the American League, came out of this experience and relates the ups and downs of a female reporter trying to cover a male-dominated sport. After this, however, Gordon turned to fiction, writing a series of mystery novels featuring female sports reporter and amateur sleuth Kate Henry, who made her fiction debut in 1988.

Henry is introduced to readers in The Dead Pull Hitter as a forty-year-old woman reporting on the fictional Toronto Titans for the Toronto Planet newspaper. While this is not a great stretch from the reality of Gordon's own life, the murder mysteries obviously are. In this debut, baseball players are being murdered and Henry is assigned to the hot story, thus turning into an investigative journalist for the first time. Critics appreciated the new perspective on the sports mystery subgenre. As a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, "This thoroughly engaging novel . . . provides a colorful inside view of the all-American pastime."

The Dead Pull Hitter was soon followed by Safe at Home, in which Gordon combines the story of a serial killer stalking young boys with Henry's experiences in baseball reporting. Henry is also forming a close relationship with police staff sergeant Andy Munro, who is assigned to this case, which involves sex crimes against the victims; and the two stories are tied together by a theme concerning homosexuality when Henry discovers that one of her baseball player friends is gay. Although a Maclean's reviewer complained that the mystery was too easily solved, causing a "major weakness" in plotting, Steinberg, in another Publishers Weekly review, declared that Gordon "scores another grand slam" with Safe at Home.

Night Game and Striking Out are the next two Henry mysteries. In the former, a woman sports reporter is murdered, a crime that seems linked to her sexual exploits with numerous baseball players, while in Striking Out a baseball strike leads Henry away from sports concerns for a while only to find herself stumbling on another crime when a homeless woman suddenly disappears. Reviewers of these books found both good and bad points about the stories. For example, in a review of Night Game a Publishers Weekly critic found the author's voice to be "pleasing" yet "derivative," while the solution to the crime was merely "moderately clever." And a Maclean's contributor, writing about Striking Out, worried that Gordon "tries to cover so many angles—homelessness, anti-abortion demonstrators, race relations—that the observations are superficial." Yet, this critic added, "Still, a good sense of place, deft pacing and the sharp-tongued Kate make the book worth the outing."

Gordon has more recently finished Prairie Hardball. This story has Henry going back to her hometown to see her mother, who is being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame because she was a player in the All-American Girls Professional League during World War II. Although there is, naturally, a murder in the story involving one of her mother's former teammates, the real interest, according to Booklist reviewer Wes Lukowsky, comes with the parts of the novel regarding Henry's relationship with her mother: "[Henry's] amazement as she learns about her mom's pokerplaying, beer-drinking, ball-playing youth" makes the novel a pleasure to read, Lukowsky concluded.

Gordon once told CA: "It took me a long time to give in to my inevitable vocation. I didn't begin to write professionally until I was in my thirties. The inevitability was genetic. My paternal grandfather, Charles W. Gordon, writing under the pseudonym Ralph Connor, was one of the best-selling authors in the English-speaking world in the early part of this century. My maternal grandfather, Isaac Anderson, was a translator and critic who reviewed mysteries for the New York Times for many years during the thirties and forties. My parents met when both were working as editors at Farrar & Rinehart. My brother Charles, also a writer, and I grew up surrounded by books, readers, and a strong reverence for the written word.

"In my teens, my family traveled widely, following my father, who was by then working for the United Nations, and much of my education came in small, international schools in Tokyo, Cairo, and Rome. My politics and world view were very much shaped by that experience, and, when I had a chance at twenty-one to choose my father's nationality (Canadian) or my mother's (American), I chose the former, a decision I have never regretted.

"Before 1979, my field of interest and experience was in current affairs. I worked for various radio and television programs, both on and off the air, while doing magazine writing on the side. One of my great loves is satirical writing, although there are few outlets in Canada.

"In 1979, my love for baseball led, through a series of flukes, to a job as the first full-time female beat writer in the American League, covering the Toronto Blue Jays for the Toronto Star, the biggest paper in Canada. I did the job for five years, then wrote Foul Ball! and returned to the real world. I think that my strength in that job was that as a woman, as a Canadian, and as one with wide interests outside of sport, I provided an alternative view of the great American pastime, which is, after all, only a game.

"I guess I keep chugging along because I am unable to take myself too seriously. I don't really consider myself a 'real' writer, even though I have been supporting myself as one for a decade. When I was writing for newspapers and magazines, I knew that 'real' writers wrote books. But my first book wasn't 'real' because it was nonfiction. Even my second book, a novel, doesn't make me 'real' because it's only a mystery. I suppose that, if I ever wrote a 'real,' serious work of fiction and won a Nobel Prize, I would still be waiting for someone to find me out and expose me as a fraud. In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun getting paid for doing what I like best."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1993, Wes Lukowski, review of Night Game, p. 1159; May 15, 1998, Wes Lukowski, review of Prairie Hardball, p. 1599.

Library Journal, June 1, 1985, Ann Twitchell, review of Foul Ball!: Five Years in the American League, p. 139.

Maclean's, March 19, 1980, Jane O'Hara, "From Maggie's Diary to the Boys of Summer," p. 40; October 15, 1990, Diane Turbide, review of Safe at Home, p. 85; July 1, 1995, review of Striking Out, p. 69.

New York Times, July 21, 1985, Lawrie Mifflin, review of Foul Ball!, p. 23.

New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, Diane Cole, review of The Dead Pull Hitter, p. 22.

People, June 3, 1985, Ralph Novak, review of Foul Ball!, p. 20.

Publishers Weekly, July 7, 1989, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Dead Pull Hitter, p. 51; April 5, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Safe at Home, p. 138; January 11, 1993, review of Night Game, p. 56.

School Library Journal, September, 1985, Nancy Choice, review of Foul Ball!, p. 156.*