Bouchercon Cleveland - Sat, Oct 6

Writing and reporting for me requires no distractions. Last year I happily sat in my hotel room after the panels, eating expensive room service food while typing away busily on my laptop reporting all my activities. I'd spend up to three hours writing and uploading photos all on my own. This year Joe was with me. I could barely sneak in an hour's worth of writing on my blog about the convention. Every fifteen minutes or so I'd hear "Are you not done yet? We have to get going!" Aargh. So my reports are all late. You'll be reading posts about Bouchercon for the next two days.  Perhaps a good thing.  I'm still embarrassed I couldn't' get it all done on time.

"Murder Is Everywhere" was this year's panel moderated by Peter Rozovsky who blogs at Detectives Beyond Borders, devoted to international crime fiction and books set in foreign countries. Though I knew all the writers I'd not heard any of them speak before. The conversations were lively and covered all sorts of insights into the cultures of Thailand (Timothy Hallinan), Greece (Jeff Siger), Botswana (Stanley Trollip one half of "Michael Stanley"), China and Mexico (Lisa Brackmann) and most fascinating of all Iceland (Yrsa Sigurdardottir).

Two of the most memorable stories came from the women writers. Brackmann (subbing for Cara Black who had to leave due to a death in her family) told of an encounter she had with a Chinese cab driver and their discussion of the huge changes in Peking. Travelling to China these days is "a little like being strapped to the back of a jetliner" she said.  The changes are huge and keep coming with increasing frequency. The cab driver felt he had more in common with Brackmann than his own people many of whom have no memory of China from the 1970s.  And Yrsa (at left) had several riotous stories about Iceland the most insane being the desire for the marketing arm of the Icelandic government  to change the name of the country to something more inviting and enticing.  Iceland just doesn't cut it anymore. Originally intended to fool invaders into thinking it was a barren wasteland the name now tends to drive away all the refugees Iceland is trying to get to emigrate there like those in disaster plagued Pakistan. When they hear the name they are turned off. Believe it or not, the best substitute the marketing geniuses have come up with Niceland.

Later that morning was the somewhat dreaded "Bucket List" panel.  I had a chance to hear Otto Penzler whose resonant voice reminded me of announcers from the Golden Age of Radio.  Unlike most panels he also acted as participant because in his own words "I, of course, know more than anyone" about the mystery novel.  In some instances that is very true. His self-deprecating humor was very welcome for a panel that oddly tended to be a bit too serious and somber. "This is my 39th Bouchercon.  [pause] I'm very old."

I say somewhat dreaded because I expected to hear the same old books mentioned as THE books you have to read. My hope was that I would be introduced to at least a handful of books and authors that would be new to me. My prediction proved correct. I knew nearly all the books recommended and had read many of them. There were only five that were new to me and, with the exception of an obscure Victorian work, all of them were published after 1978. 

Penzler threw out a type of mystery novel and asked each panel member to talk briefly about their favorite in that category. Panel members included booksellers Don Longmuir, Harriet Logan and Jim Huang, reviewer Oline Cogdill, and MWA officer and mystery writer Larry Light. The list is below. I marked the ones I never heard of with an asterisk.

PRIVATE EYE NOVEL
Penzler  - The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
Longmuir - anything by Mickey Spillane
Cogdill - The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais
*Huang - Concourse by S.J. Rozan (confessing he was avoiding Hammet, Macdonald and Chandler)
Logan - The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler and most of Sue Grafton's work
Light - When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block

TRADITIONAL MYSTERY
Penzler - The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr (talked briefly about the impossible crime novel and mentioned the famous Locked Room Lecture in the book.  I was thrilled Carr got a nod.)
*Longmuir - the works of Giles Blunt, an underrated Canadian writer in Don's opinion
Cogdill - A Place of Execution by Val McDermid (traditional?  really?)
Huang - Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell (a book he has read several times. Very witty book. I recommend all her books, too.)
Logan - Hamlet, Revenge by Michael Innes (I nearly applauded)
Light - Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout (ALWAYS mentioned in talks like this)

THRILLER (espionage, action/adventure)
Penzler - Tears of Autumn by Charles McCrary (one of the many books that plagiarist stole from last year. A JFK assassination book that apparently has parts that "are not entirely untrue." )
Longmuir - Killing Floor by Lee Child (the first Jack Reacher book)
Cogdill - Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
*Huang - Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas
Logan - Rose by Martin Cruz Smith (The most enthusiastic rhapsodic speech made about any book. She says it will appeal to a wide range of readers from those who love techothrillers to those who like feminist fiction. "It's a superior crime novel," she said, "on so many levels." She sold me on this. I'll definitely be reading it soon.)
*Light - The Shipkiller by Justin Scott (this is another one so different that I will be hunting down a copy. A nautical revenge thriller that sounds like Cornell Woolrich meets Patrick O'Brian)

A PERSONAL FAVORITE (in any subgenre)
Penzler - The Hound of the Baskervilles (only because nobody mentioned anything by Conan Doyle) but also 
Night of the Jabberwock by Frederic Brown for it's surreal and very original story
Longmuir - In the Electric Mist of the Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke
Cogdill - The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
Huang - Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (not really mystery or crime, IMO. It's more fantasy or supernatural with detective story elements. Whatever.)
*Logan - The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins. (very unusual choice and one I knew nothing about. Shame on me!)
Light - Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

No surprise that most of the books mentioned were all contemporary works. That's the way of these panels these days.  [...sigh...]  Thank God for the mention of Innes, Carr and Brown.  People really need to know of the best of the past.  I wish the Bouchercon committees would see the potentially exciting discussions that could take place if they were to allow more space for panels on vintage writers and books.

Bouchercon Cleveland - Fri., Oct 5 (part two)

As always at any Bouchercon there are few panels dedicated to mysteries of the past. The entire concept of the convention has evolved over the years to sell new books and promote the authors who wrote them. That's to be expected, but it upsets me that so little space is saved for panels to talk of the authors of the past. If a book is out of print, it can't be sold at the convention. So why bother talking about it seems to be the attitude about the older books. Each year there tends to be a Holmes panel and one other writer whose work remains in print. Last year it was Christie. This year it was Rex Stout.

Back in the spring I made a valiant attempt to organize a ready-made panel that would discuss forgotten books and suggested it to the B-con committee to include this year. It was to be about reissuing forgotten books by neglected authors -- a melding of the past and the present and it would have included some very fascinating anecdotes about what it takes to get a long out of print book back into the hands of modern readers. Suffice it to say with only two bloggers and two writers mostly known for histories and biographical accounts of writers our panel did not make the cut. There was, however, a panel called "Bucket List - The Books You Have to Read Before You Die" moderated by Otto Penzler. More on that in a later post.

I attended the Rex Stout panel called "Wolfe at the Door" even though I'm not the biggest Nero Wolfe fan so I could get a better understanding of what I seem to be missing each time I read one of those books. To date the Stout book I have enjoyed the most is Alphabet Hicks, one of the few stand alone detective novels Stout wrote, and one that has fallen into the limbo of Out-of-Printdom. It's not considered one of his best books at all though I found it to be rather innovative in my review last year.

Moderated by James Lincoln Warren the panel was made up of mystery writers Jane Cleland and Dave Zeltserman; Linda Landrigan, editor at Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine; and a substitute member whose name I never caught in the swift introductions. We were spared from Warren's usual time consuming oral interpretative skills, but had to listen to him dominate the panel with his vainglorious lecturing about his past award winning novella in the Black Orchid Novella Award writing competition sponsored by the Wolfe Pack, a group that celebrates all things Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I would rather listen to panel members talk and have a moderator ask the questions. Sometimes you get a panel hog who interrupts or talks forever, but when you get a moderator who takes over and talks indulgently about himself it gets dull very fast for me.

Most of the panel was devoted to discussing why they like Stout as a writer, why Archie and Nero Wolfe have become such iconic characters for mystery and crime fiction writers, especially American writers, and of course a usual list of the best Nero Wolfe mysteries. There was a brief discussion by the stand-in panel member (for the life of me I cannot remember his name) who gave some trivia I never knew of Stout's reaction to Edward Arnold as Wolfe (disliked the choice), Lionel Stander as Archie (hate that choice) and how he vowed never to allow any Nero Wolfe books to be adapted for the screen after the botched movie versions of Fer-de-Lance (retitled Meet Nero Wolfe) and The League of Frightened Men.

The most interesting part of the panel was when I learned about the Julius Katz stories by Dave Zeltserman. I have been won over by the Zeltserman as a true original among the contemporary writers when I read The Caretaker of Lorne Field last year.  His Katz stories came about when he wanted to enter the Black Orchid Award contest the mission of which is to revive the craft of writing mystery novellas, a form that Stout seemed to have perfected. He wrote forty of them and they are among the best in the corpus (as the Wolfe Pack like to call Stout's body of work). Zelterserman's homage to Stout's detective is Julius Katz, "Boston's most brilliant, eccentric and possibly laziest detective," who is assisted by an artificial intelligence named Archie that resides in his tie clip and is the narrator of the stories.  I had heard of these before and Patrick of "At the Scene of the Crime" even reviewed the Shamus award winning novella and another short story. To hear the characters described by the author himself along with some of his own personal insights -- he described the duo, for example, as having an almost father/son relationship-- made them all the more enticing. They are available in eBook format, but of course I am not part of that revolution.  So I'm stuck hunting them down in the old EQMM magazines where they first appeared.

Still more on Bouchercon Cleveland is coming...