After Bouchercon II: The Delmar Loop plus more books

I'm on my way to pick up the box of books I shipped home from Bouchercon (titles by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Derek Raymond, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, Gianrico Carofiglio, Roslund & Hellström, and Jakob Arjouni, among others, plus goodies from the book bag that I haven't looked at yet). While I'm away, here's a bit more from St. Louis.

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Wikipedia tells me that the Delmar Loop in St. Louis is "One of the 10 Great Streets in America," according to the American Planning Association. But I already knew it was great; I was there last week after Bouchercon 2011.

I wrote briefly about Delmar Boulevard's America's-coolest Walk of Fame; here are some of the street's signs. Delmar Boulevard is also home of the Meshuggah Café, site of St. Louis' version of Noir at the Bar; and of Subterranean Books, one of three(!) independent bookstores I visited over the course of the week. (The others were Big Sleep Books and Left Bank Books. Read about them and others on this list of dealers who set up shop in Bouchercon's book room.)

Meshuggah Café is a fine place for a reading, to judge from the clientele the night I visited: beautiful evening around 10, crowds out and about, the sidewalk in front of the store lined with people reading. Not jabbering on their phones or sending apps flying around their iPad screens, but reading books. It was probably the most startling and definitely the most heartening sight of my Bouchercon week.

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

After Bouchercon: St. Louis, where America began

(The Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where Dred Scott and
his  wife  sued to gain their freedom from slavery in 1846.)

With the last Bouchercon 2011 attendee safely out of town, and even the Jordans and Judy Bobalik on their way home, I set out for the Museum of Westward Expansion under the Gateway Arch  in St. Louis, figuring I'd discover America there.

I found more than I expected; I'd had no idea that Dred Scott began his legal fight for freedom from slavery just a few hundred yards away.



(A meeting with the Shoshone from
The Journals of Lewis and Clark)

 

(The Gateway
Arch)

Think of it: Barely forty years after Lewis and Clark left St. Louis on the expedition that opened North America to westward expansion, the same city saw the beginning of a legal fight that hardened the lines between North and South, and led to the rise of the Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.

Sure, the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts and the nation's founding documents were written in Philadelphia, but Missouri is where modern America started.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011