E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

 I am in Florida now, revisiting my old home turf, where I raised my son, and wrote my five Florida-based mystery novels, including my newest novel, RED TIDE . The weather has been weird, just as it has been weird in Seattle, now my primary residence. Seattle has been experiencing the hottest summer in recent history, unprecedented DROUGHT , and this following a winter with the lowest snowfall on record: only 16% of normal snowpack in the Cascade mountain range last winter. Meanwhile Florida is under an almost constant threat of flooding, which is occurring in the Tampa Bay area, where I stay, on an almost daily basis. Several rivers in the area have flooded to the point that hundreds of people have had to evacuate their homes, and there is no end in sight. Back when I first started writing my Tony Lowell Mystery series, beginning in the 1990s, Seattle had the wettest CLIMATE in America, and summer weather in Tampa Bay (or in St. Petersburg, where I lived) was actua...

It must really be fun being a bankster. You get free everything: basically: free holidays, free health care, free lunch, tax free, freedom to do whatever you want or go where you want at somebody else's expense, and best of all, free money. You even get free access to Congress, the White House, and Wall Street. Pretty good deal, all in all. But what do banksters do for fun, when not watching their private sports teams, America's Cup yachts from their private helicopters or aircraft carriers? Well, now I know, from personal experience, and my suspicion is that anyone who reads this blog will recognize their own place on this game board as well: it's called 'pawn.' But the game isn't chess, because that would be pretty much equal between two players, and if there's anything banksters hate it's fair play, or equality in terms of, well, terms. What banksters love above all else is to toy with people's hopes, dreams, expectations, and, well, nest ...

My love for and attachment to Florida and it's true natives goes way back: to when I was six years old, in fact, and my dad got pneumonia. His company--then a global telephone monopoly--while perhaps unaware of the irony of themselves being the cause of his illness (second-hand smoke)--felt sufficient guilt, it seems, to send him to Florida for six months to recover. I, being at the time a footloose five year old, had little choice but to leave my safe home in suburban New Jersey, along with my kindergarten schoolmates and white middle-class neighborhood gang (another story) and tag along to experience, for the first time, an alien world. I might as well have been a (really) young Luke Skywalker on Dagobah. Nothing was familiar: not the empty dunes on the coast of the strange teal-blue sea that didn't even have real waves except sometimes (I was accustomed to the Jersey shore, which had real waves on which I'd later learn to body surf). The dunes were protected by a sea wa...

My first Tony Lowell Mystery and award winner was Hour of the Manatee (St. Martin's 1994), set on the West Coast of Florida. There, years after I wrote that book, I experienced just such an hour, actually closer to two hours, swimming in the Gulf with some of the last of the manatees this past week, as August turned to September in this, the Year of the Tea Bag, 2010. My sculptor/artist friends Kevin Brady and Susan Super and I were heading for the beach at Ft. DeSoto, on the tip of a cluster of small sandbar and mangrove barrier islands at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It's a county park, and a beauty, often voted America's #1 Beach, with an old fort, a lighthouse, sawgrass dunes and lagoons, pure white sand, mostly clear water (once gin clear), and one helluva lot of mosquitos. They were mini-monsters out of a horror movie or eco-disaster 2012, the worst I had ever seen except for Canada. Skeeters to the left of us, skeeters to the right of us, pouring out of the soggy marshes ...

I was raised in a Quaker family, and grew up protesting nuclear weapons in Times Square back in the Fifties (remember 'Ban the Bomb'? That was me, a naive six year old, holding one of those signs). When I graduated from Syracuse University in 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and so was my generation. We truly believed we could change the world, bring peace and prosperity and justice to all, and—well, you know how all that turned out. Two decades later, after working so hard to change the world with so little success, I finally concluded that presenting the “truth” as I saw it didn't always work, if ever. Sometimes, I was beginning to realize, good storytelling may be a better way to reach people than on-the-nose reality. Or even gently presented reality laced with humor, the way the late great Art Buchwald mastered this skill with his political satires. Having taken my best shot at doing good without much success, I decided to try my hand at doing well, or at least mak...

Back in 1995, when my second Tony Lowell Mystery, Eye of the Gator was published (with all due acclaim) my then-publisher, St. Martin's Press, sent me to Gainesville, Florida, for a booksigning. Of course those in the sports world know Gainesville to be home of the University of Florida (and thus, presumably, lots of educated people as well, interested in the themes I was hoping to bring to the table) and naturally, anything with 'Gator' in the title should resonate loudly there. Besides, my laid-back P.I. was (albeit fictional) an alumnus of that fabled school. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that, even in the hometown of the Florida Gator, anything that didn't involve All American quarterbacks, NBA-bound point guards, or at least Ted Bundy or Tom Petty, didn't qualify. Thus my books, and presence, were met with resounding yawns. What my book was actually about, of course, in fact had little to do with the sports Gators and their fans. In fact, it had nothing ...