Alan Sharp was a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and subsequently wrote the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States. Sharp was raised in Greenock, Scotland, the son of a single mother, and he was adopted at the age of six weeks by Margaret and Joseph Sharp, a shipyard worker. His adoptive parents belonged to a Salvation Army church. His first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was published in 1965 to acclaim and won the 1967 Scottish Arts Council Award. It was banned in Scotland for a time due to its sexual content. It was the first part of a proposed trilogy, and Sharp published the second novel, The Wind Shifts, in 1967. The third novel, which had the working title The Apple Pickers, was left incomplete when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting. When Sharp moved to Hollywood he said he was interested in writing detective and Western films. He wrote The Last Run, which he called "an attempt to use the melodramatic crime chase to deal with whatever the hero's preoccupations might be." He then wrote a series of Westerns, including Ulzana's Raid and Billy Two Hats. He called Night Moves "an attempt to use the classic detective format, the private eye, and then set him in a landscape in which he was unable to solve the case."