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.

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(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

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 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