The Gordons (writers)
married couple of crime fiction authors

The Gordons were crime fiction authors Gordon Gordon (born March 12, 1906, Anderson, Indiana – died March 14, 2002), and his wife, Mildred Nixon Gordon (born June 24, 1912, Kansas – died February 3, 1979, Tucson, Arizona). Both attended the University of Arizona where they met and later married in 1932. They wrote numerous crime fiction novels, some of which were filmed.
Many of these feature fictional protagonist FBI agent John "Rip" Ripley (as noted below). After they learned that the screenwriter of Make Haste to Live received $40,000 while they, the authors, only received $5,000, the Gordons insisted on writing the screenplays for their books being filmed. Gordon was an editor of the Tucson Citizen newspaper and a publicist with 20th Century Fox from 1935 to 1942, and later served as a Federal Bureau of Investigation counter-intelligence agent during World War II for three years.
Mildred Gordon was a teacher and an editor for Arizona Highways magazine. She worked for United Press and wrote The Little Man Who Wasn't There (1946).
Mildred can be heard as a contestant on the 21st March 1951 edition of You Bet Your Life.
After Mildred's death in 1979, Gordon married Mary Dorr (1918–2004) on March 16, 1980.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1551836. VIAF identifies the subject as 156116104. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1906, 2002, 1912 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Gordons (writers)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.