There goes the bride: A Bouchercon 2009 chase scene

I'm preparing for my two panels at Bouchercon 2017 in Toronto. In the meantime, here's a post about an odd spectacle from Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis.

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(Photos courtesy of Anita Thompson)

Our small gang had set out for a late lunch and agent's party at Bouchercon when we met what appeared to be a body of vestal virgins delivering pizza.

"Have you seen a bride?" one of them asked me.

Alas, I had not.

I don't know if they ever found what they were looking for, but Bridesmaid #1 seemed determined to lead the satin-swathed entourage through every park and monument in downtown Indianapolis if she had to.

Later we saw a banquet setting up at the restaurant where we'd gone for the lunch/agent's shindig — a wedding reception, perhaps? — but no bridal party.

Sounds like a mystery to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sheep's head revisited: A Bouchercon memory

Photo by the late Leighton Gage.
 Appalling food item courtesy 
of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.

  My bags are packed, I'm ready to go, but the taxi won't be blowing its horn until Wednesday.

As I eagerly await my flight to Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, bursting with jealousy of friends who are already there, here's a photo from Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis. I post it just so I can use the headline again.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Five Bouchercons in pictures and words, plus what I'll do at a sixth

Wandering bridesmaids;
Indianapolis 2009

Oh, sure, you probably think Bouchercon is fun. But I have three 7:30 a.m. breakfast appointments at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., which begins Thursday, and odds are I'll make at least one of them.

Your humble blog keeper
with morose Icelandic
crime writer Arnaldur
Indriðason; Baltimore
2008

While I'm darning my socks and laying out my Sunday best, here are some photos from my five previous Bouchercons, courtesy of Anita Thompson, Ali Karim, and your humble blog keeper.

Your humble blog keeper
with ebullient American
crime writer Christa
Faust; Cleveland 2012



Ali Karim and Jon Jordan,
annual festive post-Bcon
dinner; Indianapolis 2009

This year I'll moderate two panels. On Thursday at 4 p.m., it's "World War II and Sons," with authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, Martin Limón, and Susan Elia MacNeal in a discussion of crime fiction set in wartime and its run-up and aftermath.

Fellow attendees on way to
annual festive post-Bcon
dinner; St. Louis 2011

On Friday at 10:20 a.m., it's Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both," with Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods. Sign up, drop in, and come ask some probing questions.

Here's the complete Bouchercon 2013 schedule. If I don't see you there, I'll see you here, with some pictures and posts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013
 

After Bouchercon, San Francisco 2010

Canned fruit cocktail: The key to telling detail in crime fiction

At Bouchercon 2009, Martin Limón said the years between the Korean War and South Korea's more recent economic and social success offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime."

I've thought about that remark while reading The Wandering Ghost, fifth of Limón's novels about Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, a pair of U.S. Army investigators in South Korea in the 1960s and '70s, especially when I read these bits:

"Small rooms open, no doors. Jam-packed with black-market merchandise, cardboard cases of canned fruit cocktail imported from Hawaii. In the next room, cases of crystallized orange drink were piled almost to the ceiling. The next held boxes of bottled maraschino cherries and about a jillion packets of nondairy creamer."

and

"The entire facility reeked of damp canvas and decayed mothballs. A cement-floored walkway was lined by square plywood bins, each bin filled to overflowing with steel pots, web gear, helmet liners, wool field trousers, fur-lined parkas, ear-flapped winter headgear, rubber boots, inflatable cold-weather footgear, ammo pouches, and everything the well-dressed combat soldier needs to operate in the country once known as Frozen Chosun."

The sheer profusion gives a convincing idea of the staggering amount of stuff it takes for a wealthy country to provision a modern army, and of the temptation to crime that must come with it. You can keep your submachine guns and briefcase-size nuclear devices for cotton-headed thriller fantasies. If I want a convincing mystery, rich with criminal possibility, I'll take a warehouse full of crystallized orange drink, nondairy creamer, and canned fruit cocktail by any day.

***

A quibble: Sueño refers to the "sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out." The term sexual harassment might not yet have been current enough in the early 1970s for anyone to use it as casually as Sueño does.

***

News flash: The Associated Press reported Tuesday that "As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates."

I suspect Martin Limón would not be surprised.

***

Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Icelandic crime update

A post I made at Bouchercon 2009 is just as relevant on the eve of Bouchercon 2010 — more so, perhaps, because I made a prediction then, and in a few days, I may find out if it has come true.

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At Bouchercon 2008 I asked Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and her husband whether they thought the collapse of Iceland's banking system could mark a turning point in the country's crime fiction. Too early to tell, they said.

At Bouchercon 2009, when the topic turned to Iceland's low crime rate and the challenges this poses to crime writers, Yrsa said that crime had risen in Iceland — financial crime. Her matter-of-fact regard of financial manipulators as criminals was refreshing.

Later, after our panel, Yrsa's husband said burglaries were on the rise in Iceland. Not a great subject for crime writers, one author observed. So, here is my prediction: Some time in the near future, an Icelandic crime author will write a noir novel of a simple burglary, due perhaps to the burglar's economic hardships, that goes wrong and turns into a murder.

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(Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be a member of my "Stamp of Death" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. The room is Seacliff C, should you happen to be in the neighborhood. Walk-up registration is available.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crimefest 2010: Blame it on Yrsa

I met Yrsa Sigurðardóttir for the first time at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore. While we were there, Iceland's banking system crashed.

We met again at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, when Yrsa was on my translation panel and everyone's economy had crashed.

Now my attendance at Crimefest 2010 in Bristol next week is imperilled by ash from that damn volcano in Yrsa's damn country. Yrsa, quite naturally, is scheduled to attend the fest.

Here are today's questions: Has any country as small as Iceland ever produced so many good crime writers and so much natural and financial disaster in so short a time? And is it all Yrsa's fault?

And here's the list of Crimefest attendees. It includes Bill James, Colin Dexter, Maxim Jakubowski, Donna Moore, Malcolm Pryce, Martin Edwards, Ruth Dudley Edwards, and many, as the saying goes, more.

I'll join them and provide entertaining and informative accounts, geological upheaval permitting.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Death in Brooklyn

He's a jovial fellow, but I've long associated Reed Farrel Coleman with death. Coleman talks about how witnessing a death in the street influenced his writing, and he told a Bouchercon 2009 panel that "I find nothing funny about murder."

This doesn't mean his fiction is devoid of deadpan wisecracks, but none is about death, dying or killing. Soul Patch, the fourth of Coleman's Moe Prager mysteries, offers this somber flight of imagination on how we deal with death and how things might be different:

"When everyone was gone, the three of us stood around watching the backhoe driver unceremoniously dumping bucketfuls of dirt on Larry's coffin. Got me thinking about how disconnected we were from death. It was easy to blame drugs, movies, TV, and video games for violence and the devaluation of human life. Bullshit! The real culprit was the lack of intimacy with death. When you're unfamiliar with death, you're disrespectful of life. No one dies in his or her bed anymore. ... Why should any of us respect death when we make it as remote as the mountains of the moon? I have often wondered whether it would be a little harder for a killer to pull the trigger or shove the blade in a second time if he had washed his dead brother's body or dug his mother's grave. What if he had watched his dad die an inch at a time from cancer and sat by the deathbed day after day after day? What if there was no church, no funeral home, no hospital, no way to pass the responsibilities of death off to strangers. How much harder would murder be?"

Kind of a serious flip side to John Lennon's "Imagine," isn't it?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Final Bouchercon photos

Here's my last batch of photos from Bouchercon 2009. Some are from me, 1, 4 and 6 are from Anita Thompson, and I may add some from Ali Karim if he puts them up.

(Left: A wary waitress.)




(Right: Anita Thompson in profil perdu.)




(Left: The rubber duck that came with my room. The duck looks less cheerful than it ought to, as if wistful for the wide-open ducky spaces far from this bath tub in Indianapolis.)




(Right: Another episode of The Bridesmaids' Quest.)





(Left: Ali Karim, Martyn Waites, Christa Faust on the Sunday comics-buying expedition.)



(Right: Jon McGoran, Scott Phillips, Anthony Neil Smith)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon X: Asleep in the lobby

Inspired by the excellent Christa Faust, I'll make one more Bouchercon 2009 post before heading out to sell a kidney so I can afford a hotel room at Bouchercon 2010.

Christa wrote about the strange attraction of the hotel bar, a region of Bouchercon where many ventured, but only the strong escaped. My favorite example came Sunday evening as I relaxed in the lobby, marshaling my strength before repairing to the bar for a preprandial schmooze. I fell asleep with my feet on a table, and when I awoke, not only were Ruth and Jon Jordan and company still in the bar waiting for me, not only had no one said, "Would you please remove your feet from the table, sir," but a member of the hotel staff had placed a second cup of coffee on the table for me. Damned enablers.

Best underrated part of Bouchercon: the music in the hotel lobby. Bossa nova, and not just the old classics, either. Plenty of stuff by new Brazilian musicians, too, and the perfect music for the location, soothing for those who needed a rest, compelling and rhythmically dynamic for those who listened more closely. Someone’s prayers to nosso senhor do bonfim were answered.

I got to Sunday's book bazaar around 10 a.m., hoping to score some books by Rebecca Cantrell and Christopher G. Moore, whom I’d heard on panels. Instead, all that remained were scraps of human flesh, huddled and quivering cozy fans, shell-shocked noir writers whimpering for their mothers, and a UN relief crew cleaning up the remains. I like the idea of a new twist on the old free-book goodie bag, but perhaps this could use a bit of refinement. Spread the frenzy out over three or four days, maybe?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon IX: Death during wartime

The funniest moments of my Bouchercon came during Reed Farrel Coleman's Saturday panel on "Dark Books for Dark Times." Coleman's swift dispatch of long-winded audience members helped, as did Duane Swierczynski's laugh lines and the fortuitous tension between Larry Beinhart (an atheist) and Michael Lister (a prison chaplain).

I was having too much fun to take thorough notes, but I did note a consensus among the panelists, who also included J.T. Ellison, that the putative restoration of order at the end of a crime story is illusory (Coleman) or, at best, temporary (Ellison).

Nothing impresses me as much as intelligent people who think deeply and seriously about what they do, so this panel was one of the conference's highlights. "I find nothing funny about murder," Coleman said, and he quoted with approval the pronouncement that "A cozy is a book in which someone gets murdered, but no one gets hurt."

***

I found a similar seriousness earlier Saturday at "War Crimes: How war shapes characters and crime novels." The four panelists set their novels during or between wars.

"War creates opportunity," said moderator Suzanne Arruda, a suggestion immediately endorsed by the panelists. James R. Benn, author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries, noted the immense attraction of military supplies for black marketeers, but also a loosening of social structures and inhibitions that allowed black marketeers and others to act in ways they never would during peacetime.

Martin Limón noted the dreadful toll of the Korean War and the country's current success as a robust, if sometimes spectacularly fractious, democracy. The intervening years, he said, offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime." Limón, who served twenty years in the U.S. army, said there was much to admire about that institution. Nonetheless, he said, "the military does not talk about crime unless it has to." And that sounds like a superb source of tension for a crime novel.

The seven deadly sins are with us at all times, said Charles Todd, "but war magnifies it. ... War is a tremendous opportunity to make money."

And what about the odd, poignant task of a wartime crime novel: to single out one death as pivotal amid the deaths of hundreds and thousands? Perhaps the surrounding carnage makes a murder victim's killing all the more tragic. "I do think that once you've waded through death, said Rebecca Cantrell, "you don't want to see any more of it."

Said Benn: "It is a grave offense for someone to be murdered when they could have survived the carnage of war."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon VIII: Roll, Jordans, roll

A tip of the battered baseball cap to Ruth and Jon Jordan of Crime Spree magazine, honored at Bouchercon 2009 with an Anthony Award for special services.

I got to hang with Ruth and Jon throughout the convention, and their warmth, energy and brains are contagious. They plan Bouchercons. They put out a magazine. They love crime fiction and its community, and they are full of creative ideas for bringing new readers to the genre. They are the sorts who make one want to roll up one's sleeves, get to work, and have fun doing it. I feel quite sure that no one has deserved an award more. (Visit the Rap Sheet for a complete list of Anthony Award winners and nominees.)

***

I occupy a fairly specialized niche, and one of the pleasures of conventions is the chance to break out, to meet authors and even entire genres outside my specialty of international crime fiction. In the past, this has led me to Scott Phillips, Megan Abbott, Christa Faust and, through Brian Lindenmuth, back to comics and graphic novels. In Indianapolis I met, mingled, dined, drank at the same table as or schmoozed with Victor Gischler, Kelli Stanley, Heather Graham, Theresa Schwegel and Rosemary Harris, among others whom I had known previously just by name or not at all.

Practitioners and fans of crime fiction's various subgenres sometimes spit on the ground at the mention of each other's specialties, so it was nice to see the hard-boiled and the cozy breaking bread in good fellowship in Indianapolis.

Of course, I had good fun with the usual suspects, too, notably talking P.G. Wodehouse with Ruth Dudley Edwards at a dinner outing that also included Leighton Gage, who started the Wodehouse ball rolling; Cara Black; and Stuart Neville. The latter drank a Newcastle Brown Ale.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon VII: Gods and ends

(Indiana War Memorial)

John Maddox Roberts sets his S.P.Q.R. mysteries in the first century BC in the waning days of the Roman republic. Kelli Stanley set her novel Nox Dormienda in the first century AD under Domitian, not by reputation one of the good emperors. I asked Stanley and Roberts which periods they would choose if they were to set a book in a different period of Roman history.

Roberts would go back earlier into the Republican period, because once the empire was instituted, he said, politics started getting dynastic and boring. Stanley, on the other hand, would jump forward, to the fourth century under Constantine, who granted official approval to Christianity. Stanley said she was interested in the various religions to which the Romans were open.

One author is attracted to political unrest, another in change of the religious kind. The common factor: Upheaval is good, at least in historical crime fiction.

(Stanley is a classicist by training. So is Lindsey Davis, author of the Marcus Didius Falco series. Davis sets her books in the time of Vespasian, who came to the plate two spots before Domitian in the imperial batting order. Had a good chat with Stanley about Italy and its art at the convivial post-convention dinner Sunday night.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon VI: Post-con posting, Part I

I will get back to serious Bouchercon 2009 reporting, but for now, the fun stuff:

1) The Weinman doppelganger attended, but Weinman stayed home this year.

2) The convivial post-convention dinner is a Bouchercon tradition of several years' standing, according to Crime Spree's Jon Jordan (top right with Ali Karim), and who would know better? Seventeen people attended this year's version, and a good and possibly productive time was had by all.

3) A small but dogged United Nations of smokers continually braved the cool weather to indulge its insalubrious but sociable habit. Last night I tore down the "No Not Smoking Allowed" sign and joined the group outside the hotel for a pleasant after-convention chat.

4) Here's my annual Christa Faust picture.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon V: Remembrance of crimes past

David Liss invoked one genre as a key to success in another at Saturday's panel on crime stories set in the past: "Historical fiction," Liss said, "has more in common with fantasy than we like to imagine."

The remark clicked with me because Liss' novel The Coffee Trader, whose central theme is commodities manipulation in the coffee trade of seventeenth-century Holland, is the most thorough and convincing fictional world in which I have ever been immersed, and creating convincing worlds (and universes) seems to this outsider to be much of what science fiction and fantasy are about.

A second panelist, Kelli Stanley, called into service a concept dear to this blog's heart in discussing the fiction she sets in first-century Rome: "I translate history," she said. Translating Latin curse words, she said, "I would use the vernacular" -- plenty of "Goddamnit!" and no "By Jupiter's nose!" And that get right at the heart of questions a translator faces whether translating a language or a period of history.

Panelist number three, John Maddox Roberts, whose work also includes Roman mysteries, noted that while the Julius Casears and Antonys and Cleopatras of the world are long dead and can't sue him, their defenders and detractors are still around: "All of these people have their fans" -- partisans who honor and embellish their names millennia after their deaths.

The fourth guest, Sharan Newman, who has been honored for her career achievement in historical mysteries, offered a practical solution to the problem of how to integrate necessary information about unfamiliar settings without turning the story into a travelogue or a lecture: Let a character do it. "In medieval mysteries," Newman said, "it's often someone who comes from another country and doesn't understand how things are done in Paris."

Next: God, truth, war and opportunity

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon IV: Among the headhunters ...

... and I don't mean the kind who specialize in executive job searches. Tamar Myers' discussion of her novel set in the former Belgian Congo was a highlight of today's entertaining panel called "Murder at the Edge of the Map."

Myers is the author of more than thirty mysteries in two series, one set amid the Pennsylvania Dutch and another in the world of antiques. One presumes none of this prepared her fans for a novel that stems from her childhood experiences as the daughter of missionaries in Africa among a tribe called headhunters at the time.

Old friend Yrsa Sigurðardóttir was on this panel as well along with Christopher G. Moore and Stanley Trollip, one half of the writing team known as Michael Stanley. This meant fifty-five minutes of tales and observations from Iceland, Thailand and Botswana in addition to Congo, and I can think of no pleasanter way to pass the convention time.

A salute to Leighton Gage, a prince among moderators.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon II — My translation panel

This Bouchercon is set up a bit differently from the 2008 version in Baltimore, with more panel discussions in each time slot, and most taking place in smaller rooms. Four simultaneous events was the norm in Baltimore; here in Indianapolis there are six or more.

The smaller rooms meant a near-full house for my translation panel with Robert Pépin, Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I was especially pleased that the panelists asked questions of one another, which meant good give and take. Nunnally told the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-stew story that led to her removing her name from the British translation of Smilla's Sense of Snow. In this case, one of the cooks was the author.

Robert Pépin had little patience with the suggestion that translation is an art, though his description of his own practice sounded suspiciously like art to me. He was also a bit of a jambon, a lively presence who was the first of the group to comment on another panelist's reply. Happily, the rest followed suit, and we had a real discussion going that ended far too soon. Fifty-five minutes for four intelligent panelists, me, and a roomful of questions? I ask you!

Nunnally's translations include works by Karin Fossum, Mari Jungstedt Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), and quite a few more. She has also written two mysteries whose protagonist is a translator. I hope to have more to report about the books soon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon I

Arrived in Indianapolis a full day ahead of the formal start of Bouchercon, which meant a few hours for socializing and for taking midnight pictures of the city's imposing Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

Ran into old friends from previous conventions -- Anita Thompson, Dennis Tafoya, Toby and Bill Gottfried, Janet Rudolph, Jon Jordan (who is already hard at work on Bouchercon 2011) and so on. Ran into Ali Karim as well, but then, one is always running into Ali Karim at these affairs.

Dinner turned into a Pied Piper parade that dwarfed what I'd experienced at previous cons. About thirty of us all told wolfed down pasta, and each of us was asked to stand, introduce him or herself, and name the best book he or she had read this year. A few votes came in for Louise Penny (Canadians were well represented at the dinner), and one each for Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water and Megan Abbott's Queenpin, both of which I endorsed.

Donna Moore stood and thrust her head straight into the low-hanging lampshade at left. It set off her hair nicely.

Tomorrow, my translation panel, plus an Irish crime fact and fiction discussion that includes Ruth Dudley Edwards and Stuart Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The medium is not the massage

I like to think I've helped lay to rest any suggestion that the Nordic peoples are stolid and humorless. (See here, too, for further evidence.) Now I'll take on that other base canard: that they like nothing better than to have the bejesus whaled out of them on a massage table ("Swedish massage" and all that):

The worst of it was over; the woman had stopped massaging and begun arranging hot stones in a row down her backbone ...

"Will it be much longer?" Thóra asked hopefully. "I think the energy's penetrated every single cell. I'm beginning to feel great."

"What?" The masseuse was incredulous. "Are you sure? It's supposed to take a lot longer."

Thóra suppressed a groan. "Positive. It's brilliant. I can tell I'm done."

The victim here is Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, the lawyer/investigator/protagonist of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's crime novels, and I sympathize with her. I once paid ten dollars for a neck massage in Central Park. I expected relaxation. Instead, I discovered aches and discomfort in parts of my body I'd never been aware of.

=================

(Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be a member of my crime fiction and translation panel Thursday morning at Bouchercon 2009 along with Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Robert Pépin.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Nothing if not diacritical: More conventional wisdom

On the eve (or, if you prefer, the brink or the cusp) of Bouchercon 2009, here are some favorite things that fellow convention-goers have said or written at, about or after my three previous crime-fiction conventions:

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"Chubby Cambodian hotties."

— Christa Faust, Noircon 2008

"A KNOB is a COCK!"

— Ali Karim, Bouchercon 2008

"For years I wrote poems, nothing but poems, and all but about five of them were shite."

— Ken Bruen, Noircon 2008

"Tense vowels don't do a man's reputation any good."

— Don Bartlett, Crimefest 2009
(After I'd worried about pronouncing
Jo Nesbø's name correctly. If "Joe
Nesbow" is good enough for the man
who translates Nesbø's books into
English, at least when he's addressing
an English-speaking audience,
it's good enough for me.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Post-convention post: A Bouchercon flashback

I received two books in the mail yesterday to aid in preparation for my Bouchercon panel, then spent a couple of hours writing up questions for the panelists and reading the books. Since that left little time for the new post I like to make every day, here's one of my favorite old ones, from Bouchercon 2008.

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Lots of people loved Bouchercon 2008, but I bet I was the only one who had such a good time that he came, left and came back again. It all started on a hot, post-boozy Sunday ...

The official part of the conference had wrapped up, and the unofficial part seemed ready to follow. Suitcases littered the hotel lobby, and among them flopped bodies of exhausted convention-goers. I don't know about the rest of them, but my body was subsiding comfortably into the floor, and my mind was close behind.

I had arranged to split a taxi to the train station with a fellow convention-goer, and I looked forward to the peace of the quiet car. I feared only that I'd be roused from sleep in time to get off at Philadelphia and make it back to work Tuesday.

But the train was far more crowded than a train has the right to be on a Sunday afternoon, and we had to grab any seats we could find, quiet car or otherwise. We couldn't find two seats together, but I did get one next to a woman having a family crisis over her cell phone.

By Newark, Delaware, I'd had enough, and I jumped the train. The hour I spent in the cool of a fall afternoon waiting for the next train back to Baltimore and the remnants of Bouchercon was the only chance I'd had all week to read, relax and recharge. But would anyone still be around when I got back to the hotel?

I felt good about my chances when I called Sandra Ruttan on her cell phone, and she couldn't hear me over the noise of the hotel bar. Seventy minutes later, I was back in the lobby feeling as if I'd never left and ready for an evening that was to include two of my most memorable Bouchercon experiences.

(Coming soon: A curious case)

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008