P.S.I.P.O.: Rock and Roll Is Here to Pay, Part II

I wasted part of my Sunday watching YouTube clips of big rock and roll stars inducting other big rock and roll stars into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame™.

Mick Jagger was graceful, fluent, humble, enlightening and entertaining inducting the Beatles, and Paul McCartney moving in the recollections with which he inducted John Lennon. Ringo Starr's acceptance speech reminded me of a barroom soliloquy by an entertaining chap four drinks too amused by his own wit. And Pete Townshend? The man needs help and understanding, or at least he did in 1988.

This was the music of just before my youth, and it's the stuff I grew up listening to. Even Townshend's borderline tasteless jokes were leavened by his humility about the Rolling Stones, whom he inducted. There's something fascinating about watching musicians talking about their own favorite musicians. It's enough to give someone my age the feeling that he knows the people who provided the soundtrack of his youth.

Then the camera would cut to reaction shots of the audience, and I might as well have been looking at a Hollywood fund-raiser for a well-heeled Democratic presidential candidate. I wondered how much it cost to get a table at the front and how prominent a benefactor one had to be. I suspect no one under the age of, say, 45 will remember when listeners were fooled into thinking that rock and roll was about liberation and rebellion. And before you say, "Bruce Springsteen," know that he recently denied a college marching band permission to perform his music, according to the band's director.

Here's a blog post from Bouchercon 2012 and my visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame™, when I wrote that "rebellion has mellowed into concern for property rights." And I just can't bring myself to link to any of the numerous online lists of "The Top(sic) 5/10/20/50 Richest Rock and Roll Stars.

© 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

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

Bouchercon 2012 and after: Stray encounters and sh**ting stars

"I'll take two," I said to the fruit vendor at Cleveland's West Side Market, delighted to find star fruit at just two for two dollars.

"Five for four," she said, filling my bag, "and here's an extra."

"For you," she said, handing me star fruits numbers seven and eight with my change.

So I'll be eating star fruit for a week. Thank you, Cleveland!

***

Michael's Produce, West Side Market, Cleveland
Photo by your humble blogkeeper

Among my pleasant Bouchercon encounters were those with Eric Beetner (it was good to be able to compliment him on his Dig Two Graves) and Julie Hyzy, who confirmed the partial paternity I'd claimed for the title of her novel Affairs of Steak and who also won the Anthony Award for best paperback original. (Stanley Trollip, a member of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel, won a Barry Award in the same category for Death of the Mantis.)

***

I met the gregarious vendors after Bouchercon. But even during the convention, I heard stories from my fellow attendees about Clevelanders' hospitality: the police officer who, asked directions by one attendee, gave her a lift to her destination. The staff member at a popular attraction who, though guided tours were out of season, said, "Come on," opened a door, and let another attendee snap some photos. The museum volunteer who ran outside to assure me that the couple who had slipped into a taxi ahead of me were not usurping my place in line, that the volunteer had, in fact, called a cab for them earlier.

Thank you again, Cleveland.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What they said on my Bouchercon 2012 panel

The panel was "Murder Is Everywhere," the moderator your humble blogkeeper, the place Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland. The stars:

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, on the lack of crime in Iceland:

"Now we have Hells Angels. Three of them, and they are on trial for pulling out somebody’s hair extensions.”

Lisa Brackmann on the Chinese taxi driver, “an older guy,” with whom she commiserated on the dizzying pace of change in China:

“He felt that in some ways I had more in common with him because at least I knew what the city was like that he remembered and that younger people didn’t know at all.”

Tim Hallinan:

"There's an enormous invisible stratification. Classes are very rigorously separated. ... When you learn to read degrees of the wai, you begin to get a sense of just how stratified Thai society is. Foreigners largely move outside the stratifications like the traditional detective in a detective novel. He can talk to almost everybody, but he can't talk above a certain level.”

Jeffrey Siger:

“My books discuss issues confronting contemporary Greece in a way that touches upon its ancient roots because it’s hard to discuss Greece without looking back at its history.”

Stanley Trollip:

“We like good food. We like good wine, and so we eat and drink with abandon and enjoyment, and we thought that maybe if you write about what you know, Kubu should do the same thing.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon 2012, Day 4+

Audience member
raising hand to ask
a question at
Bouchercon 1190,
Lower Saxony
(Cleveland Museum
of Art)

1) 5:05 p.m., Sunday — Some other conference has set up a registration table, and people are walking around wearing badges. What are they doing in my hotel?

2) The Cleveland Museum of Art has a fine collection, but it's surprisingly inconvenient to reach by public transportation. As for taxis, the cab I called from the museum at 3:40 p.m. Sunday may one day arrive, but waiting for a tectonic shift would be faster.

3) Good fun at the annual festive post-Bouchercon dinner, a pleasant tradition in which I've been taking part since my first Bouchercon in Baltimore in 2008.

4) Bouchercon makes the news! (Hat tip to The Rap Sheet.)


Waiters serving food at the annual festive post-Bouchercon
dinner, Bouchercon Dynasty 18, reign of Amenhotep III
(Cleveland Museum of Art)

Last Bouchercon 2012 picture. Left to right: Ali Karim, your humble blogkeeper, Mike Stotter

Bouchercon 2012, Day 4: A librarian makes my day

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

As always, one of the pleasures of Bouchercon has been hearing, meeting, and becoming interested in authors I might not otherwise have noticed. In this case, I came to Sunday's politics and crime panel to hear Detectives Beyond Borders friends Lisa Brackmann and Stuart Neville and came away impressed as well with Allison Leotta. My favorite question of the panel came from the effervescent Brackmann, acting as moderator this time: "It's not really political, but what's with the golf [in your books], guys? I don't get it."

The 9 a.m. "Wartime Heroes" panel offered interesting remarks from authors Joanne Dobson and Sarah Shaber about the occupational opportunities that World War II offered to American women, the brief reversion to the status quo in the 1950s, and the explosion of feminism in the 1960s. The authors' answers were neither didactic nor preachy, and I anticipate with interest how they put this fascinating historical material to fictional use.

But I experienced no pleasure greater than an Illinois librarian's comment that she's an avid follower of Detectives Beyond Borders and that the blog has encouraged her in her choices of acquisitions for her library.

***

Bouchercon is finished, except for the annual convivial post-convention dinner with Ali Karim and friends. As usual, it has passed way too quickly, and I offer special gratitude to the hospitable people of Cleveland, whom I may make the subjects of a separate post.  View the complete Bouchercon schedule here, and I'll be back soon with information about audio recordings of the panels available on CD.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon Day 3: Panelist takes a fall

Saturday was the seventh panel I'd moderated at a Bouchercon, the most fun I've had while dressed in respectable clothes, and it almost never happened.

The panel, called "Murder Is Everywhere," was on the docket for 10:15 a.m., and the previous panel ran over. When the moderator thanked the guests and dismissed the audience, one of his panelists plunged off the back of the stage and required brief medical attention. "Oh, great," I thought. "More delays." Happily a small bandage and a few stitches were all the falling panelist needed, and he was later able to joke about the mishap.

Once the stage was cleared of the wounded, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Jeffrey Siger, Stanley Trollip (one half of the duo that writes as Michael Stanley), Tim Hallinan, Lisa Brackmann (filling in for Cara Black), and I took over for fifty-five minutes of illuminating and entertaining verbal high jinks that went over the allotted time by no more than a minute or two.

Bearer of appalling
animal parts

I knew the panelists well, and some of them had expressed a desire to do things a little differently, so I tried to avoid questions I'd asked in the past. One got the panel members debating whose country, Iceland, Greece, South Africa, Thailand, Mexico, or China, was worst off. Yrsa's mention of the surprising Icelandic food she had brought to this year's Bouchercon (pickled sheep's testicles) probably contributed to the fun.

Your jovial moderator, photo
courtesy of Annamaria Alfieri

Later, a launch party for Stuart Neville's Ratlines included much beer and much good chat with a group that included Ed Lin, an author new to me who has a book on the way from Soho Crime set in Taiwan.  I am an impatient reader, ready to set aside a book that does not grab me from the first word. This will not be a problem with Ratlines.

Earlier, lunch with Jennifer Jordan, Christa Faust, and Sean Chercover included thought-provoking discussion of what Dr. Faust called "sexualization of the other in porn."

Finally, thanks to the gang who organized Thursday's Snubnose Press edition of Noir at the Bar. Food-service delays forced me to miss most of the event, but I did arrive for the last two readers and the traditional closing salutation of "Fuck Peter Rozovsky!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon Day 2: The juxtaposition

After a one-year absence, DBB is 
pleased to present the return of the 
annual Christa Faust picture

Today's favorite moment at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland, other than the photo at right, came during the "Cop vs. Constable" panel, which offered crime writers from the U.K., Australia, Denmark, and the U.S. talking about how laws, social attitudes, and police practices differ between countries and how this affects their writing.

Michael Robotham, acting as participating moderator, asked Michael Connelly: "Can you explain to the rest of the world the O.J. Simpson verdict?" A discussion of law, celebrity, and money ensued.

Not ten minutes before that question, I'd been riding in an elevator with Marcia Clark, a prosecutor in the Simpson trial, who, whether because of the trial's outcome or otherwise, has turned to writing mystery novels. I heard no gnashing of teeth or rending of garments at Robotham's query so I presume Clark was not in the room at the time. But I wonder how she'd have reacted to the discussion or what she'd have said if she'd have taken part.

***

One day til my "Murder Is Everywhere" panel Saturday (with one substitution due to a family emergency).  View the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon Day 1: Rock and roll is here to pay

Some of us remember when rock and roll stood for rebellion, particularly against greed and corporate interests. But rebellion has mellowed into concern for property rights, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland prohibits photography in almost the entire museum "Due to our agreement with artists and donors."

This led to much good-natured denunciation of the 1960s by me and a crime writer of precisely my age. "Three days of inadequate sanitation, bad food, and lies about the great drugs you never took and the great sex you never had," said I about a certain well-known gathering of the period.

"Oh," said a writer previously unknown to me, beautiful and oh, so very young, "were you at Woodstock?"

"Do I look like Jerry Garcia to you?" I snapped. "That's it; the beard gets shaved off tomorrow."

Besides that reminder of my mortality, the evening's only other disappointment was that, although the exhibits included a number of U2 artifacts, I could find no Paul Hewson postcard to send to Adrian McKinty.

*

On the way to the Hall (site of Bouchercon 2012's opening ceremony), I chatted and renewed acquaintance with guitar nut and ZZ Top freak Stuart Neville, a copy of whose forthcoming novel Ratlines I should have in my hands by the weekend.

Highlights of a full day's panelizing included my former panelist Thomas Kaufman's nomination of Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a noir writer and Peter Farris' declaration that "I always considered myself a cosmopolitan redneck in some respects."

My "Murder Is Everywhere" panel happens Saturday (with one substitution due to a family emergency). Tomorrow, I'll look forward to a Books to Die For event plus a panel called "Cop vs. Constable: A Comparison of U.S. and Foreign Laws," with Mark Billingham, Michael Robotham, Peter James, Sara Blaedel, and Michael Connolly. View the complete Bouchercon schedule.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Books to Die For at Bouchercon

Bouchercon is not all about debauchery, gin, and back-scratching. It's sometimes easy to forget that the conference is, at root, a gathering of people who love books and reading.

So, while Ali Karim naturally had his fellow diners spitting up pizza through their noses at last night's dinner, we also talked about crime writers and books we loved. Sara Gran got big thumbs up, as did Stuart Neville, John Connolly, Adrian McKinty, and (yes) R.J. Ellory, among others.

Speaking of Neville, Connolly, McKinty, et al., I have just picked up Books to Die For, and I like it already. BtDF is a collection of essays by 120(!) crime writers about the crime novels that mean most to them.

The opening pages alone will fuel many discussions: a chronological list of the subject authors, from Poe and Dickens to Perihan Mağden and Mark Gimenez. See what I mean? This is not just a bunch of tributes to Chandler, Hammett, and Christie, though they make the list, too. I opened the book at random and came upon James Sallis writing about Jean-Patrick Manchette's 3 to Kill, for example. So, the early guess is Books to Die For will be a treasure house worth dipping into for years.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bombay Sapphirecon (Post I from Bouchercon 2012)

I arrived in Cleveland and ran smack into Ali Karim before I'd checked into the convention hotel. No surprise there; Bouchercon would not be Bouchercon otherwise.

Chatted briefly with John Connolly about Books to Die For, which gets its U.S. launch here. Renewed acquaintances with Kirstie Long, Christa Faust, Mike Stotter, and Barbara Fister, among others. But mostly I realized with frightening clarity something I'd missed by not staying at the convention hotel during Bouchercons 2009, 2010, and 2011: Order a drink at the bar, and you don't have to pay for it -- some nonsense about charging it to the room, you see.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Look out, Cleveland

I'm busy selecting my Bouchercon wardrobe, so posting may be light, erratic, or both for a few days. At left is Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, part of my research for my first trip to this year's Bouchercon city.

I also know a bit about Cleveland through the crime writer Les Roberts, a former Chicagoan and Californian who writes mysteries about a Slovenian American P.I. named Milan Jacovich and has become so favorite a Cleveland son that he's one of this year's Bouchercon guests of honor. I read one of the novels years ago, before Detectives Beyond Borders, and I found Jacovich a highly engaging regular-guy protagonist.

Once I get to Cleveland, I'll moderate a Bouchercon panel called "Murder is Everywhere" with authors Timothy Hallinan, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Cara Black, Jeffrey Siger, and Stanley Trollip (Michael Stanley) on Saturday, from 10:15-11:05 a.m. (Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.)

I'll also head for the West Side Market and the Cleveland Museum of Art, though I'll miss the Harvey Pekar statue dedication. And I'll look for some good kielbasa, because it's there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The wide world of hate

Michael Stanley's novel Death of the Mantis has as one narrative current suspicion of and condescension by a group of relative newcomers to southern Africa toward the aboriginal population. The newcomers are black, the indigenous people the Bushmen, who populated the area many thousands of years before the Bantu peoples arrived.

Some years before, I'd noted with interest the suspicion and occasional derision Swedish police officers directed toward an ethnic Finnish colleague in one of Helene Tursten's books. Finns, in turn, are less than generous and fair toward their own country's Sami indigenous population in another crime novel whose title escapes me at the moment.

Finally, I recently met a Canadian who had had extensive professional dealings in China and with its population. "Don't ask the Chinese what they think of black people," he said, shaking his head ruefully.

We in America, where "people of color" is a blanket term, tend to think of racism as, by definition, directed by white people of European descent toward peoples with complexions different from theirs, generally darker. I find it a bracing reminder of the complexity and diversity of humanity to be reminded that ethnic suspicion and resentment are more widespread than that. Knowledge is good.

What about you, generous and inquiring readers? What surprising examples of ethnic suspicion and prejudice have you found in your fiction reading?

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

Stanley Trollip, who is along with Michael Sears the writing team of Michael Stanley, will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Cara Black dans le Métro

Cara Black's 12th novel, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, brings her protagonist, Aimée Leduc, back to Paris' Marais district. This is a slight departure for Black, whose previous books were each set in and named for a different part of the city, from Murder in the Marais and Murder in Belleville through Murder in Passy.

The novel's early chapters include brief but evocative scenes in the tunnels of Paris' metro, which makes this as good a time as any to dig up an old blog post, not mine but Cara's. Her post of April 11, 2011 at the Murder is Everywhere blog begins thus:

"With metro tunnels, sewers, old quarries and catacombs crisscrossing under its streets, Paris is a city of layers,"

and it's just one of several she has put up about subterranean Paris. I suspect that some of the notes she took to write those posts found their way into Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, and I get a kick of reading the raw material of the research side by side with the finished product.

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

Cara Black will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

©Peter Rozovsky 2012

What's the best weather for crime stories?

Iceland's Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has bemoaned the difficulty of setting crime fiction in a country that has almost no crime. The sometimes forbidding Nordic climes offer an offsetting advantage, however: Isolated Arctic outposts and sudden snowstorms make it easy to plausibly strand characters, kill them off, and gather suspects in one place.

Yrsa does this in The Day is Dark, her most recent novel in English translation, and Norway's Anne Holt does something similar in her novel 1222. What other Nordic crime novels take advantage of their settings in this way? How about crime stories from outside the Nordic lands? What crime novels take special advantage of their settings?

(I once spent a week in the Dominican Republic, my bliss marred only by the fear that a coconut would fall on my head as I relaxed under a palm tree. Stage that to look like an accident, and you've got the sort of crime story I have in mind.)

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

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What have you learned from crime novels ?

I've learned more from Jeffrey Siger's Prey on Patmos (also published as An Aegean Prophecy) than I have from any other crime novel that comes to mind.

The subject is the politics of succession to the Orthodox patriarchate of Constantinople, (or, if you prefer, Η Αυτού Θειοτάτη Παναγιότης, ο Αρχιεπίσκοπος Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Νέας Ρώμης και Οικουμενικός Πατριάρχης), and Siger makes of it a credible and novel thriller plot: The Greeks want the patriarchate, the Russians want it, a priest winds up dead, computer files go missing ...

I learned, for one thing, that Turkish law requires that the patriarch of Constantinople be a citizen of Turkey. For various reasons, according to Siger, including the availability of the necessary education in Turkey, this becomes problematic, and the race is one as to which of the various national Eastern Orthodox churches will be the next home to the patriarchate.

That's one hell of a narrative possibility, and not one I'd have imagined. What crime novels have taught you something about history, art, science ...

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

Jeffrey Siger will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What did Yrsa know, and when did she know it?

When I met Yrsa Sigurðardóttir at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, Iceland's economy had just crashed. When Yrsa and her husband weren't worrying that their credit cards had been rendered worthless, we speculated about what the crash would mean for Icelandic crime fiction. Too early to tell, we decided.

Turns out that Yrsa may already have had some ideas.

Her novel The Day Is Dark, published in English translation in 2011 but in its original Icelandic in 2008, is peppered in its early chapters with references to the currency crash and how it might affect daily lives:

"Fortunately they hadn't taken a loan in foreign currency for the purchase, as so many who now bore the consequences of the falling Icelandic króna had done, but the payments had increased nevertheless and they were eating into their income."

and

"...a two-story single-family home which was to be divided into two separate apartments to save the owner ... from the black hole of the currency basket loan that he had taken at the wrong time."

Next time I see Yrsa (and I'll see her soon), I will ask when in 2008 she wrote those passages. What did Yrsa know, and when did she know it?

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

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Michael Stanley and the crime-fiction trinity

I roll my eyes when I see a crime novel called "plot-driven" or "character-driven." Plot, character, and setting are co-equal, consubstantial, and probably co-eternal as well. You wouldn't ask which of a three-legged table's legs was most important, would you? Lose one, any one, and there goes the good china.

I thought these elevated thoughts after reading Death of the Mantis, third and most recent of Michael Stanley's Detective Kubu mysteries. David "Kubu" Bengu, a police detective whose name means hippopotamus in the Setswana language of Botswana, is the star of the book. Deprived of interesting physical and human settings that include the Kalahari desert, however, Kubu might be nothing but an annoyingly cute collection of endearing traits. Without a compelling mystery (and Death of the Mantis had the "So that's why!"s bursting in my head for a good while after I finished reading), the book would be a travelogue with worthwhile bits, incapable, however, of sustaining its length.

So, yes, I enjoyed the Death of the Mantis, and I'm looking forward to having one of its authors on the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon next month.  Among the novel's attractions is a note that explains, among other things, why the authors chose to use the term Bushmen for the indigenous people of southern Africa who figure prominently in the novel. Another is an excellent Alexander McCall Smith joke toward book's end.

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

Stanley Trollip is, with Michael Sears, the writing team of Michael Stanley. Trollip will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. Stop in and say hi on your way to the West Side Market.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon, Cleveland, and what I'll do there

The Bouchercon 2012 schedule is up for public viewing. I’ll moderate a panel called “Murder Is Everywhere” Saturday, Oct. 6, with panelists Timothy Hallinan, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Cara Black, Jeffrey Siger, and Stanley Trollip. Trollip is one half of the team that writes as Michael Stanley, and the panel takes its title from the name of a blog to which all five authors contribute.

I know all five and have panelized with three of them at previous Bouchercons, included twice before with Yrsa. I interviewed Tim Hallinan in 2008 here at Detectives Beyond Borders, and I’ve met and chatted with Jeffrey Siger through the others.

In this case, familiarity will lead not to contempt but to good questions, as I’ll want to avoid queries that I (and others) have asked the authors before. Such challenges are among the joys of moderating a panel. The first time I had the job, at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, for example, my panel included two translators from other languages into English, one who translated from English into French, and an author. The search for common elements among these three categories of panelists led to questions I’d likely not have come up with had I had to quiz them separately, in groups consisting solely of their exact peers.

I’ve already come up with a couple of good questions, but you won’t read about them here, because then the authors might read them. I always feel that a bit of mystery is best at a crime-fiction convention.

I’m also developing an itinerary of things to do in Cleveland, with the help a colleague who comes from there. The Cleveland Museum of Art tops the list, and Bouchercon’s opening ceremony happens at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Other recommendations include kielbasa, kraut, pierogies, the West Side Market, East Sixth and Prospect Avenue, the Flats, and jazz clubs on West Sixth Street. Unfortunately I’ll have left town by the time the Harvey Pekar statue is dedicated, but such a statue leaves me with warm feelings about Cleveland.

 ==================

"Murder is Everywhere" happens Saturday, Oct. 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. View the Bouchercon Web site for more information.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012