Crimefest 2: Drop your pants, this is a fire drill
Thank heavens a fire drill emptied my hotel Friday afternoon just as I'd removed my pants preparatory to a refreshing nap. For a moment there I was afraid I was going to get some rest and recover from my jet lag ...
... and, in retrospect, that turned out to be a relatively enjoyable parts of my day. I shall expose the institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that tried so hard to make my life a misery, but I'll wait until I'm safely home and out of their clutches.
Meanwhile, the Crimefest part of Crimefest makes me feel like Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former head of the International Olympic Committee who would inevitably declare each recently concluded Olympics "the best Games ever." This six-year-old festival keeps getting better and better. More snapshots from its first two days:
Ali Karim said: "America is mental."
William McIlvanney said: "Glasgow has an opinion about everything." A hard city of hard men? said the father of tartan noir. "I don't think it's hard so much as confrontational."
Michael Sears, half of the writing team of Michael Stanley, suggested a reason police in southern Africa may be less than eager to investigate cases of humans killed and dismembered for use of their body parts in religious rituals: "Partly because they're scared of the witch doctors, partly because they're scared of who might be paying the witch doctors."
McIlvanney again, on the impetus for his Laidlaw novels: "I wanted to acquaint straight society with its darker side, to introduce Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll."
Ruth Dudley Edwards, speaking during a panel on crime and humor, of herself and her Irish countryman Declan Burke: "We were both brought up in a society of performers."
Aly Monroe, an author new to me, on why she made the protagonist of her espionage series an economist: "Because the Cold War was all about money."
John Lawton, a fellow member of Monroe's panel on Cold War espionage fiction: "The thing about spies is that they can't wait to tell you things."
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Meanwhile, the Crimefest part of Crimefest makes me feel like Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former head of the International Olympic Committee who would inevitably declare each recently concluded Olympics "the best Games ever." This six-year-old festival keeps getting better and better. More snapshots from its first two days:
Ali Karim said: "America is mental."
William McIlvanney said: "Glasgow has an opinion about everything." A hard city of hard men? said the father of tartan noir. "I don't think it's hard so much as confrontational."
Michael Sears, half of the writing team of Michael Stanley, suggested a reason police in southern Africa may be less than eager to investigate cases of humans killed and dismembered for use of their body parts in religious rituals: "Partly because they're scared of the witch doctors, partly because they're scared of who might be paying the witch doctors."
McIlvanney again, on the impetus for his Laidlaw novels: "I wanted to acquaint straight society with its darker side, to introduce Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll."
Ruth Dudley Edwards, speaking during a panel on crime and humor, of herself and her Irish countryman Declan Burke: "We were both brought up in a society of performers."
Aly Monroe, an author new to me, on why she made the protagonist of her espionage series an economist: "Because the Cold War was all about money."
John Lawton, a fellow member of Monroe's panel on Cold War espionage fiction: "The thing about spies is that they can't wait to tell you things."
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Labels: Ali Karim, Aly Monroe, conventions, Crimefest, Crimefest 2013, John Lawton, Michael Sears, Michael Stanley, Ruth Dudley Edwards, what I did on my vacation, William McIlvanney
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:50 AM
11 comments
