E.C. (Gene) Ayres has worked on location and in the field for over thirty years as an author, screenwriter, filmmaker, journalist, columnist and film critic in New York, Florida, and Hollywood, writing for Harper’s Magazine, Running Times, Worldwatch Magazine, PBS, various newspapers, commercial television and animation studios, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. His award winning Tony Lowell Mystery series from St. Martin's Press will be back in publication after a decade beginning with a new fifth novel, Red Tide, this coming year.

Ayres spent five years researching his creative nonfiction expose The Shakespeare Chronicles questioning the Shakespeare authorship, then accepted a position for three years living and working in China as a Foreign Expert at a provincial state university in Harbin which delayed publication other than select markets. His recent nonfiction book on these adventures, Inside the New China, published by Transaction Publishing of Rutgers University, is available wherever books are sold and was re-released in March of 2013. His fact-based novel  Il Libro Segredo di Shakespeare, (Nov. 2011) a literary thriller in the Da Vinci Code tradition, has been translated into seven languages, most recently in Rome under his pseudonym John Underwood, and ranked in the top ten in the Italian edition by Newton Compton Editori. Due to its highly controversial content it is not yet available in English.

Ayres (Underwood)'s newest thriller, the second in his series The Jake Fleming Disclosures finds investigative journalist Jake Fleming covering a new Jack the Ripper terrifying East London, and in the process discovering a deadly myth-shattering link between the new Ripper and the original. The Italian title is il Libro Segreto di Sherlock Holmes (2013). 

Ayres lives and works in Seattle.