Contact M.W. Gordon:

Thanks for visiting this site. Websites and other contemporary means of communication are a bit intimidating for one who began fishing while the war was raging in Europe. I welcome suggestions from this website's readers as to how it would be more comprehensible and informative.

I didn’t begin writing a novel until about ten years ago. But I had written extensively on international and foreign law for forty-two years. I started out with a provincial education in Connecticut, receiving a B.S. from UConn and an M.A (Economics) from Trinity, all within thirty miles of my boyhood home in West Hartford. OCS and three years on destroyers broadened my vision and led me to obtain three law degrees, one in the U.S. (UConn), one in France (Strasbourg) on comparative law, and one in Mexico (Mexico City) on Mexican law. I completed two years of sessions at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands and was in the Hague to take the final diploma exam (international law) when I succumbed to malaria from too much exposure lecturing and researching in Central and South America, and Africa, over the previous six months, and flew directly home to a hospital stay and slow recovery. But that experience and the two degrees from Strasbourg and Mexico led to considerable consulting, lecturing, teaching, and writing on the variations of civil and common law. My world became the world. I taught at several law schools in the U.S. (Duke, George Washington, Connecticut, Alabama, etc.), and more abroad, including Amsterdam, Costa Rica, London (Centennial Professor in Law - London School of Economics), Frankfurt, Guatemala, Mexico, Paris, Florence, Lisbon (Distinguished Fulbright Professor), and Barcelona. It was a dream life and I enjoyed every minute. I never once walked into the UF law school, during forty years of teaching, when I wasn't excited about the day ahead.

When I stepped down from teaching law I decided to shift focus to something about fly fishing. I began building a wooden drift boat, named Osprey in my novels, went through a superb guide school at World Cast Anglers (Orvis) in Jackson Hole, and was even offered a full-time job guiding with a leading outfitter. But I thought that was a little strenuous career to begin at 74! So I decided to use Osprey to take out friends and work for such organizations as Project Healing Waters. I have towed Osprey from St. Augustine to Montana twice over the past few years.

Occasional work for the State Department over the years in such unstable areas as Yugoslavia, Cuba, the Sudan, Panama, Paraguay, Guatemala and others, gave me an understanding of our intelligence operations abroad. Thus, the idea for a novel about a fly fishing guide who was once an international law professor, but after some clandestine work while lecturing at a law college in Guatemala was placed in a protection program with a new name - Macduff Brooks - and new locations - Montana and St. Augustine. I wanted Macduff to be a good guy - not the kind of guide character who is too often the center of a novel and is fleeing from years “back east” of involvement in excessive abuse of drugs and alcohol, and mistreatment of other persons. Montana and Wyoming are more than rehab centers.

I hope my novels reflect my feelings about fly fishing - practicing catch and release, using barbless hooks, helping to preserve critical fishing habitat, and sharing the belief that fly fishing takes one to some of the most spectacular parts of the country. Fly fishing is, after all, much about simply “being there.”

Last revised: April 2019

M.W. Gordon, Author of the Macduff Brooks Fly Fishing Mystery Novels

To purchase novels, see your independent

book store, or online at:

ALL BOOKS MAY BE OBTAINED FROM YOUR INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE. BOOKSTORES AND OTHER LOCATIONS THAT WISH TO CARRY THE BOOKS MAY ORDER THEM FROM INGRAM OR OTHER DISTRIBUTORS, INCLUDING

ANGLER'S BOOK SUPPLY IN EUGENE, OREGON. AUTOGRAPHED COPIES MAY BE ORDERED AT: 
BOOKS@ANGLERSBOOKCASE.COM 
in Jemez, New Mexico.

With the printing of the ninth book - Toxic Trout - hardbound copies became available. The first eight books will be available in hardbound form over a 2-4 year span.