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

Bouchercon, Days 1 and 2

A few highlights of Bouchercon's first two full days:

Sara Blaedel

John McFetridge

Both panels I moderated Friday went supremely well. Many thanks to panelists Gerard Brennan, Paul Charles, Stuart Neville, Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, Saeah Weinman.

Two women at the bar mistook me for Jon "Crimespree/organizer of Bouchercons/center of the crime fiction universe" Jordan, though one conceded she was drunk at the time.

Mark Billingham

Kwei Quartey

Ali Karim, Stav Sheewx

Mike Stotter, Bob Truluck

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

My Bouchercon 2014 surprise: Charlotte Armstrong

I've been touting Northern Ireland crime fiction for years, so it's no surprise that I liked the books I'll discuss when I moderate Belfast Noir: Murder and Mayhem from Northern Ireland on Friday, 11:30 a.m., at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.  The real revelations for me have come as I prepared for Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, which I'll moderate at 3 p.m. Friday.

The panel will consist of five authors or editors talking about one or more favorite crime writers from out of the past. You may not have heard of all those writers; I certainly had not before I put the panel together.

You'll read more about those writers over the next few weeks, but suffice it to say that each of my five panelists will discuss at least one book that has turned out to be among the highlights of my year's reading.

I won't pick a year's best yet, but I have read no more virtuoso authorial crime fiction performance this year, or maybe ever,  than Charlotte Armstrong's 1947 novel The Unsuspected. The book is a masterfully told tale of suspense in which everything, everyone, is in doubt and knocked out of balance from the first scene to the last, a sort of Agatha Christie meets Georges Simenon meets Cornell Woolrich, with a few sly jabs thrown in. I thank panelist Sara J. Henry for choosing to discuss Armstrong.

See you in Long Beach.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs

I needed a Doc Savage novel for one of my Bouchercon  panels, and I thought Port Richmond Books might have one or two if anyone did. "Oh, yeah," owner Greg Gillespie said, with a solemn nod. He ducked into an office and fetched not one, not two, but a box full of Docs and then, before I could pick my jaw back up from the floor, he handed me another armful, some omnibuses, some single-novel volumes, mostly 1960s reprints of the books, which first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. (I bought two books, not two boxes of books.) Port Richmond Books  — Your Doc Savage Headquarters.

I also bought 77 Sunset Strip, a novel by Roy Huggins, who created the television series of the same name.  Max Allan Collins will discuss Huggins on the same moderated-by-me Bouchercon panel where Sara J. Henry talks up Doc Savage's main author, Lester Dent. Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs.

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The panel in question is Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Gary Phillips, Charles Kelly, and Sarah Weinman will join Max and Sara on the panel. See you there.

I took some photos on the way to and from Port Richmond.  Can you detect a theme common to my photography ad my shopping?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Sara J. Henry joins Team Detectives Beyond Borders for Bouchercon 2014 panel

Sara J. Henry has joined the "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel that I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, Calif.

Sara is the author of the novels Learning to Swim and A Cold and Lonely Place, the latter of which will be up for the best-novel Anthony Award at Bouchercon. For my panel, she'll discuss Lester Dent, the prolific principal author of Doc Savage, with a few remarks about Charlotte Armstrong, whose A Dram of Poison won the best-novel Edgar Award in 1957.

I met Sara at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, where she made her first big crime-fiction splash when everyone but me mistook her for Sarah Weinman. That's why I'm especially tickled that Sarah Weinman will also be on the panel. (Get a sneak peak at Sara and Sarah here, and see what all the confusion was about.)

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Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Not everyone on the panel is named Sara or Sarah, spent formative years in Ontario, or is haunted by a crime-fiction doppelganger. Max Allan Collins, Charles Kelly, and Gary Phillips will also take part. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels

I'll moderate two panels at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, and I am excited about both.

On Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m., it's

Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland, with Gerard Brennan,  Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville.

Then I'm back at 3 p.m. for

Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras,  Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, and Sarah Weinman. Each will discuss one of his or her favorite authors, a list that includes Dan J. Marlowe, Joseph Nazel, Dolores Hitchens, and to be announced.

So, one panel with some of my favorite writers from the planet's most dynamic crime fiction scene, and another with some of crime fiction's sharpest minds shining their intellectual searchlights into out-of-the-way corners of the crime fiction world. This is going to be fun

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The Weinman doppelganger: A Bouchercon mystery

Dave White mentioned the curious case of the Weinman doppelganger. I, too, experienced this strange phenomenon when chatting with a fellow Bouchercon attendee. As we talked, he suddenly looked over my shoulder and said, "Hi, Sarah!" I turned to see a woman looking back at him, dressed in black and appearing puzzled.

I scrutinized her face, her shortish brown hair, and her rangy, athletic figure, and I smiled knowingly. "That's not Sarah Weinman," I told my friend.

"It's elementary, my dear McFetridge," I continued. "The key is the subtle difference between the pronunciations of Sarah and Sara."

For our perplexed companion was not the well-known proprietress of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, but rather another writer, this one named Sara J. Henry. The case grows still more complicated. Weinman, though living in New York, is from Ottawa. Henry, though living in Vermont, is from Nepean, Ontario, now a part of – Ottawa.

The mystery deepens.

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As I waited to begin the journey that turned into Tuesday's post, a little girl scuttled across the waiting hall at Baltimore's Penn Station, calling, "Mammy, mammy!" But I'd been spending too much time with crime writers, because I at first heard her girlish cries as "Allan Guthrie!"

"I'd be worried about that kid," my travel companion said.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008