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

Off to Crimefest: Anne Zouroudi's languid island crime

I'm off to Crimefest 2013  in Bristol this week. While I pack my passport and toothbrush, I'm revisiting a few posts about some of the authors whom I'll join there. I might not have read Anne Zouroudi's Messenger of Athens had she not been on one of my panels at Bouchercon in 2011, but let me tell you: I'm glad Zouroudi made it to Bouchercon that year. She is a master of slow, languid pace, of lives stoically lived, and of wrongs righted without sentimentality. What a sense of phsyical and human place. For today's Crimefest blog post, give a big, fat γειά σου to Anne Zouroudi.

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

Anne Zouroudi reminds me of Pierre Magnan.  In Magnan's novels, I wrote:

"Consequences unfold slowly, if at all, and characters accept them stoically or with good-humored resignation or silent suffering or secret relief."

Magnan set his novels in rural France; Zouroudi sets The Messenger of Athens on a small Greek island. Her languid storytelling suggests a languid pace of rural life, with dark secrets emerging only slowly, and everyone getting the chance to relate events as he or she saw them.

Into this slow boil comes an investigator from Athens by the name of Hermes Diaktoros (the same name as the messenger of the Olympian gods), sent to investigate a death the locals insist was a suicide. The ancient Hermes was supernaturally strong and wore winged shoes; this one's epithet is "the fat man" and, though he stirs things up in ways some residents don't like, he's content to adopt the leisurely local pace, albeit with the occasional sly joke at which only he smiles.

I'll see how the mystery unfolds. In the meantime, I like this protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2012 recordings now available!

An oft-photographed scene in Tower CIty, Cleveland,
photo by your humble blogkeeper

VW Tapes is once again selling CDs and MP3s of Bouchercon panels. Buy my "Murder is Everywhere" panel and learn the shocking truth about the crime that has Iceland tearing its hair out!

Here's the Bouchercon 2012 schedule for you to use as a shopping guide. Recordings from Bouchercon 2011 are still available, and I've got a couple of panels on that list, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Delta force and other stray crime-fiction thoughts

Clearing my mental warehouse to make way for new ideas. Everything must go!!!

1) I asked Eoin Colfer at Bouchercon 2011 why the characters in his "young adult" Artemis Fowl books, even the non-human characters, were achievers — rich geniuses, elite police officers, and so on  — while the characters in his "adult" crime fiction — the story "Taking on P.J.," the new novel Plugged — are lower on the social ladder: bouncers, shady doctors, low-level hoods. Simple, Colfer said: The Fowl stories are fantasy, the crime stories meant to be believable. What do you think of his answer? Are gritty characters synonymous with greater believability?

2) Colin Cotterill, a fellow member with Colfer of my “WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel at Bouchercon, mentioned off-stage that he'd been part of a crime-fiction event in Germany staged in an operating theater — appropriate for the author of a series whose protagonist is the chief and only coroner in Laos. What's the oddest setting for a reading or lecture that you know of?

3) Mickey Spillane's 2007 novel Dead Street, discussed here yesterday, is full of amusing references to the sexual, social, and political mores of Spillane's 1950s:

"Bettie just stood there smiling in her see-through nightie, her untrimmed delta a refreshing pleasure in these days of bizarre pubic buzz cuts."

Who but Spillane could make pubic hair an object of nostalgia?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2011

McBain around the world

I speculated idly four years ago that Ed McBain might be the most influential crime writer ever. I thought of that post again last month when preparing for Bouchercon 2011.

I'd read David Hewson's The Fallen Angel, then gone back to earlier books in the series and was surprised to see the nine books referred to as "the Costa series," after the young Roman police officer Nic Costa. The Fallen Angel is very much an ensemble piece starring Costa but also his colleagues on the Questura. "Almost like an Ed McBain novel," I said during my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon, of which Hewson was a member. Yes, Hewson acknowledged, McBain was very much on his mind when he wrote the book.

Ken Bruen has one of his characters not just read McBain novels but try to write one, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson pays tribute as well. Bill Crider's books work in mentions of McBain.  Anyone else?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón and Raymond Chandler?

I asked a few days ago how crime-fiction series change over time, using the first of Martin Limón's novels about U.S. Army investigators in Korea as a case in point.

I finished the book, Jade Lady Burning, last night, and I think I found one way Limón has changed: He shed some of Raymond Chandler’s influence as he found his own voice. Granted that every hard-boiled writer since Chandler has been compared to him, and that such comparisons can be glib and facile, I'd say they’re valid here.

The ride from Seoul into the countryside in Jade Lady Burning, the scenery changing from urban to thinly settled rural, is pure Chandler. The novel’s wistful ending has a whiff of Chandler about it as well, and co-protagonist/narrator George Sueño is a bit more the lone wolf here than he is in later books, when his colleague Ernie Bascom comes more to the fore.

Maybe Limón never borrowed from Chandler. Maybe he did, but unconsciously. But if he did use Chandler as a model, he did so effectively and well. And a remark that Limón made during our panel at Bouchercon 2011 demonstrated that he is highly conscious of his own efforts to find his voice.

Limón's publication history has closely paralleled American military involvement during the post-Cold War era, with spurts of books following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then the second Iraq war. I suggested that interest in his military mysteries might have waxed and waned along with public interest in military news.

Nope, he said, the occasional gaps in his output (seven books in nineteen years) are due to his efforts over time to figure out how to be a novelist. I say that he’s gone a long way toward figuring out and that Chandler was part of the process.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

After Bouchercon II: The Delmar Loop plus more books

I'm on my way to pick up the box of books I shipped home from Bouchercon (titles by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Derek Raymond, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, Gianrico Carofiglio, Roslund & Hellström, and Jakob Arjouni, among others, plus goodies from the book bag that I haven't looked at yet). While I'm away, here's a bit more from St. Louis.

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

Wikipedia tells me that the Delmar Loop in St. Louis is "One of the 10 Great Streets in America," according to the American Planning Association. But I already knew it was great; I was there last week after Bouchercon 2011.

I wrote briefly about Delmar Boulevard's America's-coolest Walk of Fame; here are some of the street's signs. Delmar Boulevard is also home of the Meshuggah Café, site of St. Louis' version of Noir at the Bar; and of Subterranean Books, one of three(!) independent bookstores I visited over the course of the week. (The others were Big Sleep Books and Left Bank Books. Read about them and others on this list of dealers who set up shop in Bouchercon's book room.)

Meshuggah Café is a fine place for a reading, to judge from the clientele the night I visited: beautiful evening around 10, crowds out and about, the sidewalk in front of the store lined with people reading. Not jabbering on their phones or sending apps flying around their iPad screens, but reading books. It was probably the most startling and definitely the most heartening sight of my Bouchercon week.

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón, or How do authors' voices change over time?

I read two of Martin Limón's novels for my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon 2011, of which Limón was a member. Now I'm reading his first book, Jade Lady Burning, and I've noticed (or thought that I noticed) some slight shifts in tone between it and the later books.

All the books feature George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, a pair of free-wheeling U.S. Army investigators in Korea in the 1970s. But this book seems a bit more explicit about the two protagonists' sexual adventures with Seoul's "business girls" (though well short of X-rated). Its language is a bit saltier than I remember from the later books, and its attitude toward Korean business practices and the Americans who investigate them a bit more, er, jaded.

I have no idea what significance this has, but it does raise this question: How do crime-fiction series change? I've asked this question before, but this time I don't mean obvious devices, such as aging the protagonist or getting him or her married or divorced. This time I'll focus on authors and narrators rather than on characters, and I'll ask How do crime writers' narrative voices change over time in a long-running series? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

After Bouchercon: St. Louis, where America began

(The Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where Dred Scott and
his  wife  sued to gain their freedom from slavery in 1846.)

With the last Bouchercon 2011 attendee safely out of town, and even the Jordans and Judy Bobalik on their way home, I set out for the Museum of Westward Expansion under the Gateway Arch  in St. Louis, figuring I'd discover America there.

I found more than I expected; I'd had no idea that Dred Scott began his legal fight for freedom from slavery just a few hundred yards away.



(A meeting with the Shoshone from
The Journals of Lewis and Clark)

 

(The Gateway
Arch)

Think of it: Barely forty years after Lewis and Clark left St. Louis on the expedition that opened North America to westward expansion, the same city saw the beginning of a legal fight that hardened the lines between North and South, and led to the rise of the Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.

Sure, the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts and the nation's founding documents were written in Philadelphia, but Missouri is where modern America started.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011 highlights

But first say hello to two friends I met (left and right) at the St. Louis Art Museum after Bouchercon. And now, further highlights of my favorite edition to date of the world's biggest mystery and crime fiction convention:

1) The restaurant near the convention hotel that delighted my three English lunch companions by serving corned-beef bollicks (sic).

2) Quaffing a Schlafly Oktoberfest or two at the hotel bar with Eric Stone, an author new to me whose books I will begin reading once I get done with Bouchercon posts.

3) Trying to keep up with Eoin Colfer and Colin Cotterill during Saturday's “CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel.

4) The waitress who yelled at Jon Jordan and who, having no truck with tagliatelle, served me instead a plate of "tailgate pasta."

5) St. Louis' Walk of Fame, along Delmar Boulevard in the Loop. Many cities have Walks of Fame, but how many include Betty Grable, Bob Gibson, William S. Burroughs, and Phyllis Diller — on the same block?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011 audio recordings available!

The panels I moderated at Bouchercon 2011 included a fair number of memorable moments. Börge Hellström spoke calmly and movingly of being both a criminal and a victim of crime. Agnete Friis was amusingly insistent that I stick to the promise of our panel's subtitle ("How important is whodunit?"). Anne Zouroudi explained why she calls her Greek god the fat man.

Now you can hear it all (or most of it) on CD or MP3 recordings of Bouchercon's ninety-plus panels available from VW Tapes, which specializes in recording conferences and seminars. Here's a printable list of panels; mine are numbers 10 and 80.

Unfortunately my panel on comic crime fiction was one of three panels for which a recording is unavailable because of technical glitches. That means you won't get to hear Eoin Colfer or Colin Cotterill, which is a damned shame. But you ought to find plenty to tickle your ear and stimulate your mind. I can recommend, among others, panels moderated by Jeremy Lynch and Benjamin Whitmer.

Happy listening!

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011 in pictures

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

(At right, Bouchercon stragglers head to Laclede's Landing in St. Louis for dinner Sunday night. Below, Ali Karim [left] with Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Bouchercon 2011: Friis and Hellstrom on whodunnit?

After a bit of unintentional comic byplay, my first Bouchercon panel finally got around to the question in its subtitle: How important is whodunnit?

Not at all, said Agnete Friis, co-author of The Boy in the Suitcase. Very, said Anders Roslund, one half of the team whose novels include Three Seconds and Cell 8.

The two don't necessarily disagree. Friis maintains that the social predicament of her book's (and her country's) unprotected victims, rather than the solution of a crime, is paramount. Roslund had stressed earlier that the novels he writes with Börge Hellström do not star the Stockholm police detective Ewart Grens, but rather feature him as "one of two," in a kind of dialectic with a different partner in each book.

In Three Seconds, the partner is a police informant working under such deep cover that his government handlers' refusal to acknowledge him very nearly dooms him to a death in which Grens would have been unknowingly complicit. The book's point? Police and informant/criminal are equally actors and victims. So, while "whodunnit?" in the traditional sense of "Who knocked off the duke in the library?" may be unimportant, "Who's doing it?" is the book's moral center.

***

Anders Roslund and Agnete Friis were part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: The insomniacs' (fictional) bookstore

Gianrico Carofiglio's protagonist, Guido Guerrieri, sometimes visits a bookstore called Osteria Caffe Latte when he can't sleep. That establishment is a Bari bookshop run by an insomniac who opens his doors around 10 at night, closes them around six in the morning, then finally falls asleep in the apartment upstairs as the rest of Bari is well into its daily business.

At times in my life I'd gladly have lived in such a place, and the prospect is still enticing. Alas, unlike the midlife crisis and legal detail so much parts of the Guerrieri novels, this bookstore/coffeeshop/nocturnal refuge is fiction, Carofiglio says.  I'd have been ready to make pilgrimage, if not to sign a long-term lease.

What sort of commercial establishment do you most wish were open twenty-four hours a day?

***

Gianrico Carofiglio was a member of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?"  at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: "Punctuation is your friend"

 The post's title was Thomas Kaufman's response to an intelligent question from an audience member at my Bouchercon 2011 panel on CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?

The panel's subject was comic crime fiction, and the questioner wanted to know the novelist's equivalent of the timing so essential to a good stand-up comedian's success. Kaufman knows that punctuation is essential to pace and that pace is essential to comedy. The man knows how to use his dashes and his commas, and I can offer no higher praise to a fellow human.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: Off-stage antics at my panels

Up early to prepare, moderated two panels, had an appointment or two, then it somehow was late afternoon and I had neglected to eat all day.

To come, highlights of the panels I moderated Saturday:

CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER? with Eoin Colfer, Chris Ewan, Thomas Kaufman and, for most of the hour, Colin Cotterill.

NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER, with Lisa Brackmann, R.J. Ellory, Anne Zouroudi, David Hewson, and Martin Limón.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: Boobs, brains, and bald guys

I moderated no panels today at Bouchercon 2011, which meant it was time to break out the aloha shirt; shed the customary stiff,  professional demeanor; and attend other folks' panels.

The day's highlight was Russel McLean, David Corbett, Megan Abbott, Wallace Stroby, and Todd Ritter shephered by able moderator Jeremy Lynch through a discussion of crime movies. How smart and entertaining was this lot? Even though Corbett and I are 180 degrees apart on Hitchcock and a bit less than that on Chinatown, he offers plausible reasons for his antipathy in the first case and his enthusiasm in the other.

Corbett calls Hitchcock's work mere exercise, and I presume he refers to that director's technical mastery. I think he's wrong, but it's a plausible reason not to like Hitchcock; the man was famously a master of every aspect of moviemaking and a player of technical games.  Oddly enough, I find Corbett's beloved Chinatown equally calculated. To me, that movie is a  calculated effort to shock by being more explicit about the dark family secrets that underlay so much American writing around the middle of the last century. But you know what? Corbett, the bald guy of this post's title, is so sharp a commentator, so reasoned in his criticism, and so forthright about his own predisposition toward passionate storytelling that I just may give Chinatown another try.

More later. For now, though, I'll reprise a comment I made at my first Bouchercon, in 2008:

"Carousing is good. Brainy, funny people are better. Carousing with brainy, funny people may not be the highest form of human activity, but it will sure as hell do until something better comes along."

***

Other highlights:

"I love Tom Cruise, but have you seen Far And Away?"
-- Eoin Colfer

"I always carry have tuna."
-- Sara J. Henry on the packaged food that sustains her on the road.

"Watching craftsmen at their job is, I think, inherently interesting."
-- Peter Spiegelman on the appeal of the caper novel.

"I was all over that like a money shot on big tits."
-- Christa Faust's enthusiastic reaction upon being asked to join the first night's panel on "Sex, Violence, and Everything That Makes A Book Great." This is nothing more than savvy self-promotion, of course. Christa's best-known novel is Money Shot.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What I've learned at Bouchercon 2011

I still don't know what Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will do the next time she has to introduce me,  but I do know that my first panel, at Bouchercon 2011,  "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT"?, went exceedingly well. Some highlights:

1) Anders Roslund's anticipating my question about the significance of the protagonist's name in the series of thrillers he writes with Börge Hellström.  That protagonist is named Ewart Grens, he appears in such books as the Dagger Award-winning Three Seconds and the Cell 8, among others, and grens does apparently mean border in Swedish, as it does in other Germanic languages. I had assumed the name suggested, ironically or otherwise, that Grens is a bulwark against international crime in the books' borderless Baltic world, but Roslund chalked it up to Grens' actions that sometimes straddle the border between good and not good.

Note that Grens is not the stereotyped tough-guy cop who stops at nothing to get the job done, the cop so tough the law can't contain him, and so on. No, his misdeeds raise real moral questions. For an example, read Box 21.

2) Gianrico Carofiglio's insistence that he surprised when an enthusiastic Italian critic said his first novel, Involuntary Witness, was the best legal thriller ever written in Italy. "I never thought I wrote a legal thriller," he said. As successive novels did will commercially and critically, he said, he decided that "I write legal thrillers." The same was the case when readers would ask if his books were autobiographical. No, he said at first. Then, once the books turned out to be hits, yes.

3)  Lene Kaaberbøl  cowrote The Boy in the Suitcase with Agnete Friis. She also translated the novel from Danish into English. That's why I asked her if the book's reference to a brutal pimp as "the man with the serpent tattoo" was a message to Stieg Larsson ghost and to his English-language readers. No, she said, though she did appear to enjoy the suggestion. Intentional or not, it adds one more layer of meaning for readers, just as the multiple implications of Grens.

4) A Hendricks and tonic at the hotel bar costs $12.98.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: My first highlight

Sometimes it's not just
what's said, it's who says it:

"This is Peter ... Rokofsky? I have so much trouble with that name."

-- Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Martin Limón on cleanliness and Korea

Bouchercon starts Wednesday night. While writing a list of questions for my panelists (and checking it a lot more than twice), I found these cultural observations from Martin Limón. The first is from his novel The Wandering Ghost. The second is from Buddha's Money:

"`She's very clean,' the landlady told us, `for an American.'"

and

"If anyone in the West thinks of them at all, it is as rice farmers or merchants or tae kwon do instructors. But Koreans have been sailors and fishermen since before history began."

One does not normally think of Korea as a seafaring nation, so that second passage gets me curious about the country's history. Who says crime fiction can't be a spur to learning?

***

Martin 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