E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

News: my new Tony Lowell Mystery RED TIDE (an eco-thriller) has just been published by Booktrope. Please click on the image for a link to my page on Amazon.com, for more details. I need to say, in full disclosure, that this book was 17 years in the making, for personal reasons including health, state of mind, a need to move forward, working overseas in China, sending my son off to college: the list goes on. But this series was ahead of its time when first published back in the '90s, and was in need of revival. And the post-Katrina post BP disasters in the Gulf of Mexico made the need to renew this series, and it's environmental overtones, all the more pressing. For a little history, my first book of this series, Hour of the Manatee , was winner of a national book award and competition (the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First P.I. Novel competition) back in 1992 (it wasn't published until 1994. It was followed by three more titles: Eye of t...

Lowell and Perry are at it again, sitting on the dock of the bay, Manatee Bay, having a toke, and Perry is morose as usual. This time it's about all the cigarette butts that have washed up on shore. "Leave it to Big Tobacco to trash the world," grumbles Perry. "You never saw a pot head who littered like this," he complains. "That's true," nods Lowell. "Unlike cigarettes, weed is au natural ." "I was down at Albertson's last week," says Perry, careful to stub out his joint and replace it in his pocket. "They have these Mexicans to sweep up the parking lot, but they miss a lot." "How do you mean?" asks Lowell, fishing out a netful of cigarette filters that have clustered around his dock piling. He's long since given up on catching any edible fish, but sometimes nets come in handy. "There was this stiff breeze coming in off the Gulf. It was blowing all this small stuff the sweepers miss up against t...

I picture my laid-back detective PI Tony Lowell hanging on the dock with his Native American pal Perry Garwood sharing some really good Panama Red, and also some really good Jamaican Red Stripe. Life is good. But Perry is bugged, as usual. "Tony," he says, "have you read about this situation in Washington State? Here we are in the middle of an eco-meltdown, eco-as in economy plus eco-as in ecology, a serious meltdown, and there's no money except in those banks getting all those bailouts." "Bail is important," notes Tony, deeply inhaling the still almost pristine Manatee River mist. "Innocent until proven guilty, remember? Plus, a lot of our clients depend on that. What's liberty without bail?" "Yeah, sure, OK, but here's the point. America's got 1/4 of all the prison inmates in the whole world." "Maybe it's because we have a lot of bad guys," suggests Lowell, reasonably. "Sure, but it's like, look ...

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...

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...