E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

We've all had it up to our ears and beyond: all of the half-truths, exaggerations, misrepresentations, lies, and distortions on television. And that's just the news! Then there are the ads, that make the good old fashioned lie almost virtuous, by comparison. Which of course leads to those so-called 'public announcements' that are political ads. Which are every bit as truthful as say, Hitler announcing his new humanitarian child care program at Auschwitz. Still, there is nothing new about all this, and these practices have been around for a long time. Most of us probably are too young to have read it, but back in 1960 there was a bestseller by a Madison Avenue guru named David Ogilvy called Confessions of an Advertising Man , in which, even then, the founding partner of the premier New York and London ad agency Ogilvy and Mather and inventor of modern advertising complained that “political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of adver...

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...