Blogs beyond borders

The titles of the panels I'll moderate at Bouchercon next week, combined with their geographically diverse makeup, leave me with the obvious choice of talking about setting, about a sense of place and how authors create it.

Fortunately, five of the ten writers on the two panels already do that regularly in group blogs with fellow crime authors. Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley, contribute to the Murder Is Everywhere blog, as do Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Cara Black. Christopher G. Moore is part of International Crime Authors Reality Check.

The first thing to know is that these are not authors' promotional Web sites. You'll find no book excerpts here, no blurbs, no fancy pop-ups and graphics. Instead, the authors write seriously, and sometimes whimsically, about the countries where they live, write, and set their books.

Thus Yrsa shares thoughts on the pronunciation of her name and the difficulty of rendering that pronunciation in a post that expands to take in Icelandic phonetics, conventions of naming, and mythology.

Or Cara Black, whose most recent novel, Murder in the Palais Royal, takes us briefly underground, spends a bit more quality subterranean time in a post that probes Paris' medieval past as well as her own literary history.

Sears writes about South Africa's pride in the success of soccer's World Cup. Moore explains that "In Thailand, highchairs illustrate the great urban and rural cultural divide."

So check out their posts for informative and informal lessons and stories on France, Iceland, South Africa and Thailand. And if you like the blogs, check out the books.

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(Michael Sears, Stanley Trolli, Christopher G. Moore and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be members of my "Stamp of Death" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. Cara Black will be on my "Flags of Terror" panel Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010