Bouchercon 2014 in a few more words and pictures

Gary Phillips brought up the mysterious Roosevelt Mallory during the  "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.  I now have Double Trouble, third of Mallory's four Radcliff novels, on order.


I've already mentioned my discovery of Dolores Hitchens, Charlotte Armstrong, Roy Huggins, and Ennis Willie in the course of my preparation for the panel, thanks to panelists Sarah Weinman, Sara J. Henry, and Max Allan Collins.

This was an especially rich Bouchercon for new discoveries, and I'm grateful to the panelists who helped me make them. (I intend no slight to the fifth panelist, Charles Kelly. I'd already started reading his author, Dan J. Marlowe, two years before the convention.) And here are a few more photos from Bouchercon 2014, all photos by your formerly humble blog keeper, with the exception of the Double Trouble cover.

At left is Ingrid Willis, who did such a fine job as chair of this year's Bouchercon. The noirish fellow at right is Stacey Cochran, who is doing the same job for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. I've already registered. Have you?

Finally, two pics of my Bouchercon peeps and one from after the con. At left, Ali Karim points to the visual welcome from the Hyatt Regency Long Beach. At right/below, Mike Stotter contemplates the world through the prism of David Morrell's Macavity Award for Murder As a Fine Art. Below left, a mammoth reflected in the Lake Pit at the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits. The mammoth is a reproduction based on fossil evidence. The oily slick is real.  (Read all my Bouchercon posts from before, during, and after the convention.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Musical and other weirdness in Southern California

Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, Los
Angeles. All photos by Peter Rozovsky,
your formerly humble blog keeper.

I dined with a friend Wednesday evening at Berri's Cafe in Los Angeles, which had the exquisitely awful idea of piping in throbbing, droning club music during the earlyish dinner hour. Not only were we subjected to the worst music ever created, but at a time that not even lovers of that music could like. This is music for 3 a.m., not 8 p.m.  The food was not bad, though.

Did I say the worst music ever created? That's the New Age trance music that a Marina Del Rey-area Starbucks pumped in during yesterday's coffee. For all its top-down corporate paternalism and its mangling of the English and Italian languages, Starbucks generally offers good music to drink one's mispronounced doppio macchiatos by. But not here. There are many great things about Southern California, but the music offered for public consumption is not one of them.

Sunset off Malibu Beach

Then I landed in Philadelphia, where a television in the baggage claim area blared a  breathless news story about arrangements for the White House Christmas party. You expect that sort of thing from entertainment channels like Fox or MSNBC, but this was CNN. I understand that "serious" and "American television news" are mutually contradictory, but CNN was once considered serious, wasn't it?

Wigwam Inn, Rialto, Calif.

Lying Los Angeles bus-shelter sign

And then I went to wait for my train into the city, where loudspeakers lent an Orwellian/Kim Il Sungian aspect by blaring, indoors and out — the worst music ever created.

Also from the Page Museum

© Peter Rozovsky 2014