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, ...

The mythical interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution originated, not surprisingly, with an NRA gathering in Texas in the 1950s, sponsored, not surprisingly, by the gun industry, that saw (correctly) huge profits to be gleaned from paranoia. The origins, of course, are and were racism. It was very simple, really. When the Constitution was being written, Southern delegates to the convention, led by Patrick Henry, were very worried about the dread possibility that slavery might be abolished in the New Republic; or even worse, that slaves would be inspired to rebel, should any of them be able to read, or overhear discussions regarding 'freedom,' and might wrongly construe that it somehow might apply to them; thus goading them to act inappropriately, i.e. revolt. Mr. Henry, a prominent Virginia lawyer as it happened, owned 110 slaves, and other family members many more. His worry was very simple: there must be a readily available means for putting down any poten...

It isn't just happening to black people, although they are certainly taking the brunt of it. Much as occurred in Nazi Germany prior to World War II even white, middle class people are being targeted by the police. I should know. It happened to me. Three years ago I was accused of a minor misdemeanor (a charge later dismissed) and arrested on the spot. I was handcuffed behind my back, paraded past a terrified wife and daughter, marched past curious neighbors and onlookers, and thrown into the rear of a police car which had hard plastic 'seats' in back with no upholstery. There I was forced to sit on my hands (and those handcuffs) for 90 minutes, until finally booked into the county jail (by contract in another county). That was only the beginning. For starters, if you are ever arrested for any reason, you can forget about the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which has been all but deleted. You will be treated as a criminal until such time as you can prove your inno...

For those of you who once read my blogs, and might read them again, I am back. It has been a year of silence, that happily is about to be broken. I was fighting many battles in my absence, in many ways and at many levels: for my life. I am back, at least for now, because I have won those battles at last, if not the war. As to that, one cannot truly control the outcome of one's life, much as we might wish otherwise. Still, we can try. Imagine, if you will, having to pick up your life and move (we've all done that) but in the process, incurring a grievous injury requiring surgery. Then take it further: that you go to sleep in pain, and wake up a different person. Or two different persons: persons who do not relate to you, who are hostile to you and to each other. One is manic; the other profoundly depressed. So then you reach out for help and are given medications, and the medications trigger a terrible reaction. So then you try, try again, and finally find balance. Imagi...

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-...

Recently I attended a rather remarkable catered event sponsored by Amazon.com's answer to the democratization of publishing--CreateSpace--whose motto seems to be 'Anyone can be an author.' Unlike, apparently, in the old un-democratic days when you had to be able to write, with a product that passes at least somebody's version of muster (usually one of those now-nearly extinct educated female editors with a no-nonsense approach and a degree or two from Barnard or Wellesley). Yet here in the now in Seattle, it all seemed fitting, because one of the key topics was having a so-called 'platform,' and as former publisher and editor Alan Rinzler (who has published and edited such dauntingly diverse clients as Toni Morrision, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Shirley MacLaine, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, and Robert Ludlum and thus has stood on lots of platforms prior to this one at the Asian Art Museum) put it, "who are you to write about this subject?" Indeed...

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Matthew 13:57 I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time , and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country. So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so h...

Lowell and Perry are out sunning, as usual. As usual it's late afternoon, to avoid the mid-day Florida heat. Perry is circumspect, as usual. Lowell is working on the brightwork of his perpetual rehab project, the schooner Andromeda . Keeping up the wood finish on a wooden boat in Florida is about like painting the Golden Gate bridge. By the time your done, it's time to start over again. "Hey, Lowell," says Perry, through a cloud of cannabis. He's been smoking more lately, and enjoying it less. "Don't you ever get tired of working on your damn boat?" "Sure. Every year," responds Lowell, slapping on a new coat of varnish on the stern rail, having finally finished re-sanding it. "Seems to me you spend about ten hours of varnishing for every hour sailing, wouldn't you say?" Lowell grins. "So few? I'd put it at more than a hundred to one. In fact, when was the last time we went sailing, like out on the Gulf?" Perry re...

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...