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

"Do you get much—"

(Two scenes on Bush Street, Nob Hill, San Francisco. Photos, as always, by your humble blogkeeper)

Your kind comments on my previous post got me reflecting fondly on San Francisco's Bouchercon 2010 and my other recent crime-fiction convention, and I realized I had more to show and tell. (So does Ali Karim, though he exaggerates about me and the waitress.)

Back in Philadelphia, a pair of profane utterances ran through Noircon 2010 like leitmotifs through a Wagner opera. Here, then, are some of that conference's best-loved lines:

"Do you get much pussy?"

— inmate to George Pelecanos after Pelecanos had talked to a prison audience about being a writer


"Do you get much pussy?"

— shouted response to "Any questions?" following every subsequent panel session. Much laughter ensued.


"Fuck you!" (and variants including "Fuck you, Cullen!", "Fuck you, Peter!" and "Fuck you, Megan!")

— panelists' response to the equally ubiquitous (and equally jocose) post-discussion question "How do you define noir?" Much laughter ensued.

Want more? See you at Noircon 2012, Nov. 8-11.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

OK, one last San Francisco picture

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index ©

(#Noircon2010: David White [left] and Howard Rodman discuss Fantômas)Christa Faust (left), here with Butch on her lap and Vicki Hendricks to the right, provided one of those hotel-bar, a-ha! moments that make crime-fiction conventions such a treat for the mind even as they wreak havoc on the body.

She had bought Darwyn Cooke's graphic-novel version of Richard Stark's The Hunter, an adaptation I'd found slightly disappointing for its fidelity to Stark's novel. I reasoned that a comics adaptation ought to add something that words alone could not accomplish. Christa argued for strict obedience to the source; I defended infidelity.

But then she said look at the hands, at the panels in which hands fill the frame and their attitude tells the story. Stark's novel tells us about Parker's hands, but I don't think it focuses on hands nearly as much as Cooke does. So thanks, Christa, for opening my eyes to the power of hands.

***

So, what is the Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index (HAT-3C-LI ©)?

A Hendrick's gin and tonic cost $14.24 with tax at Bouchercon 2010's convention hotel in San Francisco; at Noircon's hotel in Philadelphia the cost was $9.90.

Using the San Francisco cost as a baseline and assigning it a score of 100, Philadelphia's Hendrick's score is 69.5, nothing to laugh at in these hard times.

What's your city's Hendrick's score? (Trust me: You'll enjoy the research.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Late-breaking convention pictures

Here are me and my "Stamp of Death Panel" at Bouchercon 2010.

From top left: your humble blog keeper; Christopher G. Moore; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, known to readers as Michael Stanley.

At left are me and my man Bill James at Crimefest 2010. At right, it's me at the same festival with Ali Karim, who kindly provided these photos and is here pictured for the first time ever without a gin and tonic in his hand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

John Connolly, Scandinavian crime fiction, and me

John Connolly cited James Lee Burke during his Bouchercon 2010 discussion with Declan Hughes of "Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die."

Among other things, he said there are "two landscapes in crime fiction. One is psychological." In Burke's evocation of landscape, Connolly said, "We have kind of an association with Scandinavian crime fiction."

I was thrilled to hear that because I'd written about landscape in my Following the Detectives essay on Arnaldur Indriðason. Here's some of it:

"People disappear in Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but the soil has a way of yielding them up again. An earthquake cracks the land, drains a lake, and uncovers a body; a victim turns up on a construction-site excavation; in spring, corpses come to light in a lake, where winter ice had concealed all signs of their disappearance. ... `The setting is a character' is a commonplace in modern discussion of crime fiction; in Arnaldur, the setting is a narrative agent as well. The landscape swallows up victims, whether of murder, accident or natural disaster; geological disruption lays them bare again."

What other authors give landscape a similarly important role?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon 2010: The last Hammett post

You know what the first picture is. It's on Burritt Street, a half-block from my post- #Bcon2010 hotel.

Scene Two is 580 McAllister Street, a key location in "The Whosis Kid," a fine tale in its own right and a prototype for The Maltese Falcon:

"My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness*. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street. ...

"The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.

"A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall** when I took my plant there.

"It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness into the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.

"A curtain whipped loose in the rain. ..."

* — Van Ness Avenue is just out of the picture to the right. Redwood runs parallel to McAllister behind number 580, home of jewel thief Inés Almad, the mastermind of the heist that triggers the action in "The Whosis Kid." The view here shows the approximate location of the shootout to which Hammett is building up in the passage quoted above.

** — San Francisco City Hall was behind me and off to the right as I took this picture, and I presume it's still there. Much of Hammett is an accurate topographical guide to the city.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

I con, you con, we all con ...

I left Bouchercon, now Bouchercon is coming to me. Sunday, James R. Benn, Henry Chang and Stuart Neville, all members of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon last week, will appear in Philadelphia in support of their new books.

Nov. 4-7 is Noircon 2010, which will bring former Boucherconers including Megan Abbott, Patti Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Christa Faust, Laura Lippman, Duane Swierczynski and many more, to town. (Among the many more is George Pelecanos, so this could be a good con.)

I'm turning into a regular con artist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

After Bouchercon, or San Francisco, crime city

Bouchercon 2010 ( #Bcon2010 ) lasted four days for most but eight for me, and the bulk of my sightseeing came after my fellow attendees had gone home, exhausted by four nights of carousing at a hotel bar that stayed open as late as midnight.

San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood reminded me of Vertigo, the Embarcadero put me in mind of The Lineup, and Nob Hill was saturated with Hammett.

And then there was Inner Richmond (left/above), home of the excellent Green Apple Books. The neighborhood reminded me of no particular book or movie. But, like other areas of the city, it had the general feeling of an older time. If Nob Hill looks like the 1920s, Richmond looks like a small city in the 1940s or '50s. In both cases, the noir and hard-boiled ambience is rich.

Paradoxically, the city's modernity is partly responsible. The streets are honeycombed with overhead cables that power San Francisco's environmentally friendly electric buses. This evokes the days before power and other cables went underground.

The palm-lined block at left is somewhere on the way from Noe Valley to the Mission District, and if you saw a street that pretty in a movie or read about it in a crime novel, you'd know something dreadful was about to be revealed.

Finally, a mural from the Mission District (above right), just because it's cool, and a political candidate whose name is bound to keep the voters mellow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon wrap-up: Connolly and Hughes's 10 crime novels to read before you die

More than ten, actually, because Declan Hughes and John Connolly, the two participants in the #Bcon2010 "Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die" session, sometimes disagreed which book by their top ten authors was best.

Each also gave an appendix of more novels at session's end, which gave Friday's lunchtime session-goers even more to think about.

1) Heading the list, appropriately so for a convention in San Francisco, was Dashiell Hammett. Hughes chose The Glass Key, Connolly Red Harvest, and Hughes, never a man to be shackled by understatement, called Hammett "the Bach, the Louis Armstrong" of crime fiction. "Everything started with him." I'd say Hughes was right.

2) Where Hammett goes, Raymond Chandler follows. Connolly and Hughes chose The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, if my memory serves me well. "I believe I can tell the level of [Chandler's] drinking by chapter," Hughes said. Added Connolly: "I think Chandler is a great writer and a terrible novelst." Connolly's beef? Chandler's plotting.

3) Up third, Ross Macdonald. For Hughes, "his achievement is unsurpassed." In Macdonald's Lew Archer, Connolly said, "we have the first great Christ figure in the genre."

4) Patricia Highsmith, in whom Connolly "senses a genuinely unpleasant person" and whose novel Deep Water Hughes called "a perverse comedy of manners."

They also cited Ed McBain, "the father of the police procedural"; The Friends of Eddie Coyle; and James Lee Burke ("He had not read much crime fiction," Connolly said. "He comes out of a very different tradition.").

Hughes favorite Margaret Millar made the list, as did Red Dragon (Connolly had much of interest to say about the Hannibal Lecter books) and the surprise of the lot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Hughes said Christie could say in a few sentences what P.D. James would take three pages to say.

More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

891 Post Street, San Francisco ...

... three books Dashiell Hammett wrote there, and 111 Sutter Street, where Sam Spade and Miles Archer had their offices.


© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Can a posh author write crime fiction with an edge?

(Mural in San Francisco's Mission District, photo by your humble blog-keeper)

Val McDermid suggested during her interview of Bouchercon's international guest of hono(u)r, Denise Mina, that an author's working-class background can lend her books a hard edge.

Mina agreed, suggesting, among other things, that "crap jobs are good for dialogue."

Mina said she left school at 14, not for those crap jobs, at least not at first, but rather to sit around and smoke and watch TV. She later attended university and became an academic, though she says she misused her grant money by writing a novel instead. She went on to become a great success as a novelist, graphic novelist and cultural critic. If a working-class edge is so important, I asked her, how does one maintain that edge in the face of success?

"That's a brilliant question," she said. One of her ways is through charitable efforts whose benefits go directly to the people who need them. One current effort, she said, gets people into higher education.

What's your take? What does a writer's background bring to his or her fiction? What does a working-class background bring? Can a posh author write crime fiction with an edge?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 5: A preliminary wrap-up

Eddie Muller was the #Bcon2010 toastmaster. He's also a native San Franciscan and was a member of Friday's "San Francisco noir" panel. He had this to say about the city as a breeding ground for noir after someone said people come there to reinvent themselves:

"We breed people who exploit those people when they come to San Francisco. ... There are people who are waiting here to exploit those who come here to find themselves."

***

Three authors who impressed me with their intelligence, humor, critical acuity, willingness to stake out provocative positions, or some combination of these: John Connolly, Denise Mina, Val McDermid.

***

Three of my panelists whom I enjoyed listening to as they talked about their native country of South Africa at the bar: Jassy Mackenzie, Michael Sears, Stanley Trollip.

***

Two panelists with whom I ate dim sum in Chinatown on Sunday: Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Christopher G. Moore. (Their spouses were there, too, and I'm happy to have them as panelists-in-law.)

***

Panelists who were exceedingly pleasant to work and spend time with: the lot of them. Really.

One hears whispered tales of difficult panelists, but none was mine. The aforementioned plus James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang and Stuart Neville were good company, and concise, entertaining and informative in their answers. I enjoyed our discussions on stage and off. Thanks, guys.

***

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon 2010: Women with guns

Had I paid better attention during the "Flags of Terror" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2010, I'd have heard soft clucks of disapproval from a hundred female tongues, and maybe the sound of bullets being chambered as well.

I'd noted that Jassy Mackenzie's protagonist, Jade de Jong, was a crack shot, and I suggested that this was unusual for a woman in crime fiction. Afterward the sister of one of the panelists scolded me gently for my statement and nominated Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone as a female crime-fiction protagonist who knows what to do with a gun.

My remark was a throwaway line; had I had more chance to explain, or had anyone in the audience spoken up, I'd have suggested that Mackenzie emphasizes her character's skill with a gun more than do most creators of female protagonists. But maybe that would have got me in more trouble.

Read Jassy Mackenzie's thoughts on firearms as part of this interview, and read her novel Random Violence for Jade de Jong and guns. Best of all, weigh in yourself.

Which female crime-fiction character are especially good shots and especially comfortable using a gun?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 3: Things that drive them nuts

Yesterday's Bouchercon 2010 panel sub-titled "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" asked writers about hellish experiences they'd had on book tours and pet peeves in their own reading.

Martyn Waites' bête noire is the "the jazz detective," but only the one who listens to "real cool jazz" — Miles Davis or John Coltrane. "It's become such a bad cliché," Waites said. "`This makes them wounded but somehow interesting people.' No, it doesn't."

Karin Slaughter demurred thus when moderator Mark Billingham pleaded for a happy story: "All of my nice stories are tinged with personal horror."

And John Connolly bemoaned sneering in the crime-fiction community at literary fiction: "There's a kind of reverse snobbery coming into the discourse," he said, "and that's really stupid. That's going to set crime fiction back two decades."

What does that tell me about John Connolly? That the man probably tries to work hard to avoid formula in his writing.

***

What are your pet peeves in crime fiction? What do you think of the panelists' pet peeves?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Words of Bouchercon: "I have no ****ing clue"

"I love you to death, but I have no fucking clue what you're talking about."

— Panelist's reply to his moderator's doctoral thesis of an introduction

Coming soon:

• I muster the detachment to talk about my own two excellent panels.

• I muster sufficient praise for Declan Hughes and John Connolly's lunchtime discussion of "The Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die."

• I summarize bar schmoozing with Jassy Mackenzie and Stanley Trollip.

• I talk about women, guns, and the dangerous things that happen when they get together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 2: The cure for excessive drinking

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 1 and Tokyo Year Zero

It's easier to report on a Bouchercon panel when one has passed the hour in the audience rather than on stage moderating. That's a phenomenon full of psychological interest, but we can talk about it in another post.

In any case, Thursday's "Stamp of Death" panel with Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Christopher G. Moore talking about their books, their countries, and their cultures, and your humble blog keeper moderating, proved an convivial hour for the participants and, I hope, an entertaining and informative one for the audience. Details later.

As always at conventions, some of the most illuminating remarks are uttered at the bar. The day's favorite for me came from a Japanese crime-fiction reviewer named Naomi Hoida, who said that the British crime novelist David Peace had done a fine job in his Tokyo Year Zero. The book traces an investigation that takes place amid the hellish chaos of postwar Japan, and Naomi said she was surprised a foreigner could write so sensitively and accurately about the period.

Over the course of the day, met and hob-nobbed with John Lawton, whose attire included a Mailer-Breslin campaign button; Robert Ward, and Otto Penzler.

Now, to bed to rest up for moderating "Flags of Terror" on Friday, with authors James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang, Jassy Mackenzie and Stuart Neville.

And, with a heads-up to Sean Patrick Reardon, this year's Christa Faust picture (above right).

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day -1: Friends, Romans, countrymen ... lend me your Yrsa

Arrived in San Francisco after a productive flight, on time but jet-lagged. Was about to give up on my 9 p.m. meeting at the convention hotel with panelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir when she showed up to deliver a copy of her new book, Ashes to Dust. Then the floodgates opened.

I had one of my panels drinking at one table, the other at another, and the estimable Christa Faust with her entourage at a third. I ran shuttle-hospitality missions among the tables with no great result except the possible germ of a revolution in the distribution of crime fiction in South Africa.

But all good things must come to an end when one has an 8 a.m. breakfast the next day. On the way back to my hotel, I found a familiar face enjoying a late-night pick-me-up in front of his hotel after a hellishly long travel day. Nothing says Bouchercon like Ali Karim with a glass of gin in his hand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Kelli Stanley: The San Francisco tweets

Kelli Stanley (left) is an even bigger boon than Rice-a-Roni for San Francisco Bouchercon 2010-goers. She's been busy on Twitter, tweeting tips for visitors, of which I'll reproduce as many as I can:

• #Bcon2010 tip 23: Calif Cable Car is next to hotel--but also see the Powell St car and the classic turnaround at Powell & Market!

• #Bcon2010 tip 22: 90 degrees in SF today & tomorrow, but fog will be here by Friday--bring layers for evening/Bay cruise!

• #Bcon2010 tip 21: B'con organizers consulted weather wizard, guaranteeing beautiful skies! But bring layers for Bay cruises and foggy PMs!

• #Bcon2010 tip 20: Hang out at the Crimespree table! Get a book signed, buy a cool t-shirt, & register for next year! :)

• #Bcon2010 tip 19: In need of a pick-me-up? Don't forget the hospitality suite, co-hosted by local MWA and SinC!

Older tweets, as so often the case in life, are temporarily unavailable.

***

(Complete Bouchercon 2010 schedule here, including my two panels: "The Stamp of Death," Thursday at 3 p.m., with Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Christopher G. Moore; and "Flags of Terror," Friday at 10 a.m., with James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang, Jassy Mackenzie and Stuart Neville.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010