E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

It is unusual for me to devote a blog to a single work. There are always exceptions (and should be) and in this case, my son Jonathan urged me (with appropriate bribery involved) to watch the recent film Knives Out .  I make an exception for this film because it is exceptional in multiple ways. Written and directed by Rian Johnson , c learly well beyond up-and-coming, with this film, he reminds me of another talent from a past age: Joss Whedon .  One of the principal characters is Harlan Thromby, perfectly performed by Christopher Plummer , as a best-selling mystery author with an extended family of sycophantic dependents, with whom he is entirely fed up and all of whom he is planning to disinherit forthwith. He even has a throne, his own iron throne, which is certainly an intentional tribute to the one in Game of Thrones.   So on his 82nd birthday, he assumes his throne and commences informing his descendants of said intentions person to person, one by ...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's  Sherlock Holmes  stories have been produced in both film and television on numerous occasions. The BBC's recent series, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (previously known as Frodo in his impetuous youth) is just the latest example. Well acted and scripted (mostly original material), although I took a strong objection to the final two episodes involving Holmes' evil sister: a character I suspect Doyle would have discarded into the dust bin, and rightfully so. There have been two other series including the recent  Elementary  starring Lucy Lieu, glaring as ever. There have also been at least three movies, with a fourth in development (apparently the producers don't even have a script. Just a name, which is, apparently, sufficient). The most recent two films star  Robert Downey Jr . and  Jude Law , and likewise the third. I recommend both, and hopefully the sequel will meet those standards. I did have trouble,...

My first book, Hour of the Manatee  was a political thriller, as well as a P.I. novel. As a written genre, it spans a very wide gamut from historical to contemporary (to fantasy, for that matter, such as the Songs of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones) by George R.R. Martin. If there is one name that, in my humble opinion deserves to be at the top of the list it would be the master of historical fiction: Ken Follett . Follett started out as a journalist, but that work did not agree with him, so he moved on to publishing, with a small London publisher. He started writing in his spare time, motivated by the need to pay for car repairs (sound familiar, anyone?). While that didn't pay off, but when he was ready to go to publication (almost self-publishing, in a way) his first book--a spy thriller-- Eye of the Needle --  was a huge international bestseller, selling more than 10 million copies. A true real-life fairy tale once again: a huge success on one's first book, with im...

As author of my own P.I. detective series The Tony Lowell Mysteries , and having now covered the origins of this genre in the real world, the time has come (the walrus said) to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings --oops, that's not the real world, sorry Alice, never mind, but you get the idea. P.I. novels have few requirements: the first is a believable premise (see my blog on this), with a strong protagonist (not necessarily physically, that's a cliche--the strong, silent type etc.).  The first series of novels (actually often short stories) was A rthur Conan Doyle 's beloved Sherlock Holmes series--at the time the most popular literary works of all time, apart from  The Bible. These were published starting in the late 1880's, off and on for the next two decades. Doyle even brought Holmes back from the dead with The Hound of the Baskervilles , after killing Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty (with a fall into the Rei...