After an admirable career as a civil service firefighter and veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Alan E. Losure was enjoying the retirement life. However, on a fall day in 2017, his daily three-mile walk went a bit differently.

In his mind, Losure saw a vision. A man was sitting at a table, inside of a log cabin, writing. An oil lamp stood on the table next to the man, and using that light Losure was able to see what the man was writing.

“I just felt like I was an invisible part of his story, and it haunted me,” he said.

He went home and told his wife, but decided to try and ignore the vision. When it simply could not be ignored, he typed it out. He was encouraged to publish it, which had never even crossed his mind. Five years later, he has published 14 books and counting.

His stories tend to be set in the 1890s, in his hometown of Gas City, Indiana. The inspiration came from a building in town that sported its founding year - 1892 - and he found himself at the local library researching as much as possible.

“This is a unique time when automobiles began to slowly become a part of our daily lives, before airplanes; when the streets were made of dirt rather than asphalt and people rode horses instead of riding in Hondas,” he said.

Although he doesn’t use the names of real people that he comes across in newspaper clippings on the library’s microfilm readers, he does use real photographs that he feels match the characters perfectly. He typically searches for cabinet cards on eBay and purchases them so he is in possession of the original copy.

Losure said that his stories play like a movie in his mind, and when he doesn’t see anything else, he feels the story is complete. Despite not being an active viewer or reader of murder mysteries, that is typically the genre he writes. The historical aspect of his stories come from his love of history, which was his favorite subject in school and became a lifelong passion.

Typically the titles of the book come to him before he even begins writing, while the covers of his books also come to him as a vision, which he draws out and sends in for illustration.

His wife, Susan, plays a major role in publishing his works. Not only is she his biggest supporter, but she is a wonderful proofreader. This genre also isn’t her first choice as a reader, yet she happily shares his latest work with her fellow churchgoers.

“It's something I never in my life expected to do, and that makes it wonderful because it is a surprise,” he said.

His latest book, The Curse of the Hanging Tree, tells the story of Stanley, an intellectually disabled teenager who is savagely lynched for a crime he did not commit. Word of a terrible curse spread through the town as those involved with Stanley’s death met with a terrible death of their own.

Is the curse responsible for the strange occurrences that continue? Is there another force that may be involved? It is now up to Marshal Justin Blake and his deputies to solve this lingering murder mystery and put an end to the death and destruction that continues to torment the good people in present-day Gas City.