E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Following up on my recent blog about women being the primary victims of bad driving, as a mystery author I have to note (and acknowledge) that women are in fact more often than not the primary victims of pretty much all violent behavior, worldwide--not just traffic violence--whether from a major war in Afghanistan or a local domestic dispute in Topeka. And how many of such events are, or ever were, triggered by women? Granted Anne Boleyn was of dubious character, and some people died due to her machinations and manipulations. And you can come up with your own examples. But there is only one female serial killer (one!) on record, in the U.S.A. Her name was Aileen Wuornos, and she killed a series of creeps on I-95 in Florida back in the '80s who tried to pick her up. And she got executed for it. And she was completely insane, not that it matters. But this singular women killer killed creeps, mind you. Not naive housewives, or girls in bars. Was she bad? Sure. But compare her to, ...

As an author, I have had a long and complicated love and hate affair with eBooks, and know this will sound self-serving, but my first mystery novel, Hour of the Manatee , was the very first book ever published in electronic format. It happened like this: I'd been doing a reading of my second Tony Lowell Mystery, Eye of the Gator at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida, when a man came up to me afterwards and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. His name was Don something (real name best forgotten in any case) and he claimed to have invented the first eBook reader. Moreover, he had a working model to prove it. The year was 1997. What Don wanted was a book that had some public visibility to convert onto his reader as a demo, and my first book, as a national book award winner and still selling well, would suit his purpose perfectly, and I could see no down side at the time. So I agreed. Don's business plan, such as it was, was to publish eBooks in mini-...

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 ...

Dear Readers: What an ordeal. Here I had a great blog, all was going smoothly, when suddenly, for no apparent reason, it vanished in a cloud of digital smoke: poof! Oddly enough, my last blog was titled: The Politics of Pot. Could there be a connection there, somehow? Could those who have attacked and demonized Michael Phelps just for being a normal American kid be on my trail as well? I was writing about my non-conformist, unorthodox, ex-hippy detective Tony Lowell at the time. Tony Lowell, as it happens, just like probably a hundred million other Americans who remember the Sixties (or at least still listen to the music) has been known to do a Michael Phelps on occasion. They hypocrisy of calling that action a crime is so monumental and sweeping (thanks to the recent powers-that-be of the past decade) that it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh demanding that all "druggies" be put in jail, while snorting Oxycontin between sets. Puhleeze, enough already, and let's hope our almost...