E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Pet Peeve: Hollywood producers have long had the habit of shooting location footage in their back yard and calling it Rome. Or Alaska. Or Seattle. Or New Jersey, where I happened to grow up. What these people seem obliviously, vaingloriously, utterly incapable of grasping, or even imagining, is that the rest of the world, or for that matter the rest of the country, does not in the slightest resemble those brown, burned out hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, and resemble nothing so much as, well, Los Angeles. This past week I was watching two of my favorite shows, and they are favorites no more, because I have become so weary of having burnt brown stains smeared across my screen and being asked to believe it is Seattle, or Princeton, or Niagara Falls. Do these people in Hollywood actually imagine that nobody outside of Los Angeles County (or for that matter, inside of Los Angeles County) ever goes outside, opens their eyes, and looks around? That we won't notice the Hollyw...

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...