Gene Ayres is a graduate (B.A.) of the Syracuse University Creative Writing program, which also produced such writers as Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and Joyce Carol Oates. He worked in New York for seven years producing short films for the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, New York University, "Sesame Street," ABC, and Time Life Television, then went on to write and produce for various other PBS television series at stations in Maryland, Arizona, and California. Among the public affairs shows he wrote for were Consumer Survival Kit, Bill Cosby's Feelin' Good, and Understanding Human Psychology.

            Moving to Los Angeles, Ayres continued working in public television, and then began writing for commercial television, primarily in animation, including serving as principle writer for the animated hit series, “The Smurfs.” He worked as co-producer and feature development writer for director Jack Arnold at Universal Pictures (Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Mouse that Roared), wrote the original draft of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (among other projects) and was recipient of a Warner Brothers Writers Fellowship in 1982. Ayres left Hollywood in 1989 to return to Florida (where he spent some early, formative time as a child) and write a mystery novel with a Florida setting. During that time, he divided his time between writing, caring for his young son and working as film critic for TV Channel 10 in Tampa/St. Petersburg.

            After a brief stint as a newspaper columnist in New England, Gene Ayres was lured back into the film world in late 1992 to write and produce films for a small company in Santa Fe, New Mexico called 20/20 Productions. A week after moving, he got word that his first novel manuscript, Hour of the Manatee, had just won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers Association of America's Best First Novel competition. The book was published in hardcover in 1994, under the name E. C. Ayres (not E. C. Ayers) and subsequently released in paperback, both from St. Martin's.

            Ayres moved back to Florida in 1994 to write his second Tony Lowell Mystery for St. Martin's, again as E. C. Ayres (not Ayers): Eye of the Gator. A third book, Night of the Panther followed in the spring of 1997, both to critical acclaim, and his fourth novel Lair of the Lizard (set in Santa Fe) was published in November 1998. A fifth book Cry of the Heron was ready for release by St. Martin’s that year, then withdrawn due to a contract dispute. That book was published in February 2009 by World Audience (see The Tony Lowell Mysteries) under Gene Ayres’ own name.

            Author Gene Ayres (writing as E. C. Ayres) has been a featured speaker at the Florida Suncoast Writers' Conference, the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival, Sleuthfest in Ft. Lauderdale, and the Riverside Writers’ Conference in Tampa. In 2003 he published the cover story in Worldwatch Magazine about perchlorates in the food chain, and in 2004 a story in the Chicago Heartland Journal about sports in China. And from 1998 to 2004 Ayres made several trips to England to research the truth about who really wrote the Shakespeare canon, which became the basis for his forthcoming literary expose: The Shakespeare Chronicles, under the pseudonym of Desmond Lewis.

            By the time his son Jonathan was ready to go off to college in 2004, Gene Ayres was ready for a change. When the job offer came to teach in China, he sold his home and possessions, made the move, and never looked back, except to write about it. The China experience opened up numerous new horizons, and he began writing again, completing five new books:

            Inside the New China: An Ethnographic Memoir chronicling his China adventures and misadventures (March 2010)

            Cry of the Heron, reintroduces offbeat detective Tony Lowell and the genre of the Eco-Thriller, which Ayres created in 1991. (The entire Tony Lowell Mysteries backlist, originally by E. C. Ayres, can be found at www.worldaudience.org).

            Black Dragon River, a mystery set in China and based on Gene Ayres’ own experiences there and a true life murder that took place on his campus in Harbin (no publication date set).

            The Shakespeare Chronicles: Published under the pseudonym Desmond Lewis, this literary expose may well rewrite English history as we know it. A nonfiction Daughter of Time.

            Babes in Toon Land: A young adult mystery novel based on the author's own experiences in Hollywood. This will be ‘Catcher in the Rye’ goes ‘Almost Famous’, with an Obama-esque viewpoint and a cartoon twist. It will be the first major novel ever written set in the animation industry, which Gene Ayres knew only too well.

            Gene Ayres can also be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com

            and the Internet Movie Data Base at www.imdb.com