E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Today's New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof drove home a particularly sore point with me, in regards to my book A Billion to One : An American Insider in the New China . This book, and of course I, the author, take the position that a truly objective and accurate perception of what life is really like in China today could only be offered by someone who is not a "known expert." Such a person, for example Kristof himself, would be watched, followed, monitored, and escorted everywhere. And his fully programmed and monitored visit would be short: a week, perhaps two, a month at most in a foreign setting like China. Whereas I, as an unknown (at least in China) was free to come and go, live among the people, walk the walk, and talk the talk (well, some of it, anyway). Yet when I returned after nearly three years to the States with a stack of dispatches, chapters, blogs and memoirs about those experiences (and a new Chinese wife and step-daughter to boot) my subsequ...

My current favorite TV show is Boston Public. It’s an often humorous, usually outrageous, and over-the-top, but still thoughtful look at our so-called justice system. One of the key elements about the legal system is how often it has nothing to do with justice. Not so the mystery genre, in which I write. In the real world, justice depends on who’s in charge, who calls the shots, who can afford the best lawyers (Denny Crane) or the best lobbyists. Only in a theoretical world, a world of right and wrong, of clear distinctions, where ‘might makes right’ is a falsehood, where the good guy always wins, is there true justice. Which, unfortunately, is mostly a world of imagination and fiction. Maybe this is why this kind of fiction is so popular, anad why justice is what I like best to write about. It's what too few people get, in their lives. They hope things will be better in Heaven, of course. It's why they believe in Heaven. Because too often there is none here in our world. Those...

There's no question that when I published the first Tony Lowell Mystery back in 1994, the idea of a private eye who preferred weed to Winstons and Kung Fu to Kalashnikovs was perhaps more than your average hard boiled mystery reader was ready for (the cozies were a different market, and Tony Lowell hardly fit into the Miss Marple role either). I've since learned, at least during that era of the rise of the Religious Right and NRA nationists, that mystery fiction was a mostly conservative genre. At least back then. Which was odd, given that most readers then, as now, were women. Odd, that is, until you see the rapid rise and huge success of the hard boiled female detectives and their authors, like Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Paretsky. My Tony Lowell had a female counterpart, of course: a right wing female police detective. Maybe I should have let her run with the series. But no matter. What's done is done, and I am banking today that a nonconformist P.I. with a Sixties outlo...

It may be a particularly American phenomenon. Or maybe it goes back to the Ancient Greeks. I think it goes back to the cave man, actually. But given all of the stresses we already face in our lives, why is it we always seem to be in such a rush? I’ve been this way my whole life, and on those occasions when leisure is a must, or at least preferable (sex comes to mind! Or a good meal) it’s hard to change one’s ways. I even have this thing called a shaking leg syndrome. And now my wife Tina has it too. Is this how we found each other? Or is it contagious? This all may be primordial, of course. A leftover instinct or gene from a time when we had to be on full alert at all times, or that saber tooth tiger lurking on those rocks up ahead was sure to get us. Or you. Us or you. Which also may explain why more men (the hunter chromosome) might have this problem than women. Although certainly some women are in a big hurry to catch up, it seems. Ironic. All my life I’ve been glancing at my watch....

Hello, World. My name is Gene Ayres: a nice, simple, two syllable name. If only. Sadly, I have learned in life that nothing, even a name, can ever be simple. For example, I used to be known as E. C. Ayres, in literary circles. Then I learned too late that if people happen to live in a Red State, or a former one like Florida, which I did, or, say, Chicago, home of William, they will have an irresistible need to correct my spelling to “Gene Ayers,” or, formerly, “E. C. Ayers.” Don’t ask why. I can’t explain it, it’s just one of the things. But it did cost me a lot of book sales. It’s bad enough to have been born an Ayres and to be forever mistaken for an “Ayers.” It’s even worse to be named “Eugene,” my full name (don’t even ask about my middle name: we won’t go there, at least not in this blog). Back when I was fighting for my seat on the school bus, Eugene was just not a name you could safely have. It’s small comfort decades later that it has been since assumed by lots of cool rap sing...