I started small, visiting the same Spanish Harlem botanica for months, buying candles and herbs recommended by the proprietor and becoming friends. Eventually I told her about my novel and after much scrutiny (that I was portraying Santeria in a good light) she set up a meeting with a local santera, also an espiritista, someone slightly higher up on the Santerian spiritual food chain. The espiritista came up with a prescription for me: a ritual cleansing known as a limpia, the cost $40 (like psychotherapy, you just don’t get well if you do not pay for your treatment).

I showed up for the cleansing in a new white shirt (recommended and soon to be removed), stood in the back room of the botanica shivering (nerves or the bare chest or both), lit candles and repeated Spanish incantations, When I complained of a headache the espiritista dappled my forehead with blue-colored water – and it worked! After that she poured a mixture of egg yolks and herbs over my bare neck and shoulders (more shivering), and crushed gladioli into my chest (a slight burning sensation). I was told to stop eating red meat (how she knew I had just eaten a hamburger I have no idea), that I should wear white beads or link-chains around my wrist (I now do), and to avoid casual sex (no comment).

At the end of the ceremony I was told to roll up my white shirt (purchased specifically for the occasion at Banana Republic), wipe the egg goo and gladioli off my chest and throw the shirt away as it had now absorbed the evil spirits, which I did. With my lightweight jacket drawn around my naked torso I shivered all the way home from Spanish Harlem. But I used the experience – almost exactly – in Anatomy of Fear, and frankly I’d do it again (this time with a prepared list of ailments and desires).

Spending time and money on research just goes with the territory. I own way too many books on forensics, true crime, crime scene photos and serial killers, which I needed for my first two novels, The Death Artist and Color Blind; books on the art the insane (Color Blind); hate crime (Anatomy of Fear), Gulf War Syndrome and human experimentation (The Murder Notebook). I often wonder if someone is keeping track of the books I buy online (The Evil That Men Do, The Psychopathic Mind, Faces of Evil, to name just a few) and worry that one day this library of horrors will come back to haunt me.

In the name of research I have walked the back streets of Harlem and perused the last rotting docks along the Hudson River late at night (The Death Artist); flown to Houston to see the Rothko Chapel (The Killing Art); contacted and befriended officials in the U.S. Army and the FBI (The Murder Notebook); and tried my best to think like a woman for my first three novels featuring ex-cop Kate McKinnon which meant a day perusing Barneys upscale women’s clothes and even trying to imagine myself in the uh, woman’s role during sex (please note that I said imagine).

Six days on the road? I would say closer to 60 and still counting. But right I am looking forward to hearing my fellow panelists recount some of their best – and worst – days.

To read all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Now, I haven't been to Baltimore in a number of years, but I'm assured that the city does, without question, kick ass. So I'm more than a little enthusiastic about Bouchercon. Perticularly given the topic of my first panel, "Janie's Got a Gun: Do you need to kick ass to be kick ass?"

Crime fiction is known for books that are edgy and full of weapons and violence—but as an author of historical suspense, I deal with some extra constraints. Victorian ladies didn’t tote guns and weren’t martial arts experts. My heroine, Lady Emily Ashton has to kick ass without doing it literally.And that can be a challenge.

In the novel I just turned in, Emily is trapped in an underground cistern with a really, really bad guy who’s wielding a gun and would happily kill her. 

But it’s also immensely satisfying.

When you’re writing, sometimes getting backed into a corner can be the best thing ever—it forces you to think more creatively and keeps you from being lazy even for a moment. I spent about three days banging my head against the wall before an elegant solution came to me. But once it did, I knew that it was a better ending than one in which Emily managed to physically overpower her nemesis. She kicks ass, but by using her brain.

To read all the Bouchercon guests posts, click here.

Truth is, I got lucky. Timing is a big part of getting noticed. Your manuscript has to land on the right agent’s desk at a time when said agent is in a relatively positive frame of mind and in the mood to read the kind of thing you’ve written. That happened for me after only 23 rejections. And a few short months later, we had a two-book deal with HarperCollins.

I was also lucky because I met some very supportive people along the way. People who showed me the ropes, encouraged me, and made introductions. Two in particular, Jon and Ruth Jordan, opened a lot of doors.

Now, as the second of those two books hits stores, I look back and realize how very lucky I was, and I am grateful. If the universe had been configured slightly differently, I could just as easily been a guy with his mattress stuffed full of rejection letters.

Yes, getting published was easy; the hard part was writing the book…

Lawrence Block (coincidentally, one of the guests of honor at this year’s Bouchercon) was a huge influence, but reading his novels set the bar so high that I often despaired and gave up. Same with Walter Mosley. And SJ Rozan. And Laura Lippman (another guest of honor this year, and local star). I started a lot of novels during these years, but never finished one.

Block’s books about the craft of writing, however, were helpful. And that started me on a binge of reading "how to write a novel" books. Which is a lot easier than actually writing a novel.

Finally, I woke up one day and I was 35 years old and I had a bunch of half-written manuscripts at the bottom of various drawers, and I just got fed up with myself. So I resolved to stop reading books about how to write a novel, and write a damn novel. More important, I would finish what I started.

I remembered a piece of advice from some book or another, wrote it on a note card and stuck it to the wall above my computer screen. I referred to it often. It said:

And the manuscript I finally finished was my first published book.

So, readers, I’m driving down the turnpike to come to Bouchercon on Thursday. I have fond personal memories of Baltimore. For six years I worked in Columbia, Maryland as president of HEAD Sportswear, makers of ski, tennis and golfwear, and spent a lot of time here in town. This is my first time back.

It’s a good meditation on the vagaries of life to think back on that time. Then, I was a 24/7 guy who was pushing with everything he had to restore luster to a tarnished tennis and ski brand. I had an MBA from Columbia, a lot of chutzpah and ambition, traveled two hundred days a year, and my final thoughts before falling asleep each night were generally how to rebuild the brand. Writing crime thrillers then was about as far from my reality as conversing in Chinese. In 1989, when HEAD became #1 again in both tennis and ski, (and we celebrated with a massive party in Las Vegas,) I felt a sense of personal triumph I doubted would ever be equaled in my life.

Flash forward 20 years. A couple of turnaround opportunities didn’t quite turn around. All the chutzpah and ambition in the world couldn’t fight a market declining 15 percent a year. One day I found myself out. Desperate, I gave myself over to this nagging whim I had carried since college, more outright fancy than thought-out.

I had this cool idea for a thriller.

It didn’t.

It never sold. Got close. Found a fancy agent, raised a few brows. What it did do, though, was miraculously find its way into the hands of a top-selling author looking to partner up with someone to get out a few more ideas. That first breakfast with Jim Patterson changed my writing life. We did a book. It went to #1, his first. We did five more. They all went there too. Over, seven years it became probably the best co-writing gig in the business. And what I learned from Jim was invaluable-- like a combination MFA-MBA.

Seeing my name at the top of the lists, boarding planes and counting my books as I passed the rows, it was that same triumphant feeling all over again.

So here I am in Baltimore again. This time I have two novels of my own, The Blue Zone and The Dark Tide. Both made the N.Y. Times list. Maybe not #1, but climbing. I’ve been writing crime thrillers for twelve years. I’m struck by the amazing way life has come full circle—diverse, rewarding, fulfilling in ways I never imagined. And also by how it’s changed. No one here would ever even recall I once had something to do with the HEAD company. Once I traveled relentlessly; now, I rarely leave the house. Once I was so obsessed I yelled at a Miami sales rep for not being out on the road in Hurricane Andrew. Now I talk about seeing your kids grow up, finding balance, advising burnt out business people on how to reinvent their careers.

Once I stayed awake at night plotting growth strategies. Now, I’m still awake, just plotting.

Ever since I first learned of Bouchercon, I’ve heard that for a writer, the best place to network is the bar. This is slightly awkward for me, since I’m an alcoholism treatment professional whose first mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, is about people in recovery. ("Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder.") The fear that I’m marching to a different drummer in the great army of crime fiction writers became acute when I was invited by this year’s Bouchercon organizers to be part of what’s being called "the booze panel."

I’m certainly not the first mystery author to explore the theme of recovery. The great Lawrence Block’s tough-guy protagonist Matt Scudder got sober more than twenty years ago. In recent books, he’s maintained his sobriety and attended an occasional AA meeting. Scudder’s sobriety has the ring of authenticity. Yet Block still takes readers for a walk on the dark side. Far from finding a new family in AA or a spiritual path through the Twelve Steps, Matt still meets his best friend, a career criminal, in a bar. Another fine writer, James Lee Burke, presents New Orleans homicide detective Dave Robichaux in novels frequently described as "brooding," "dark," and "gritty." I suspect that Robichaux is depressed.

Alcoholic fictional cops and private eyes still outnumber their recovering counterparts. And the possibilities are far from exhausted. I conceived my protagonist, Bruce Kohler, as an amateur sleuth mostly because I didn’t know any cops or private eyes when I started writing the book more than ten years ago. (That has changed, thanks to the mystery community, my clinical work, and the Internet. I’ve talked to a thousand cops about post-traumatic stress and even hugged a few, in addition to tapping their expertise on guns and police procedure.)

I’ve had my work cut out to make sure my fellow panelists on the booze panel get it. They include Ken Bruen, the award-winning Irish master of literary noir, the even noirer Jason Starr, Con Lehane, whose protagonist is a New York bartender, and thriller writer Michelle Gagnon, who used to be a bartender herself. When moderator Ali Karim emailed us his first draft of possible subjects to discuss, he included such questions as "What’s your favorite poison?", "What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you while you were drunk?", and "Do you write better when you’ve had a few?" I’ve paraphrased, but that was the gist. Clearly, I had to fight back.

I’ve been called for jury duty many times, but never gotten onto a jury, and it’s usually because I’m an expert on alcoholism and substance abuse. When they describe the case, I can’t help focusing on the role addictive substances have played in it. Even if they don’t mention drugs or alcohol, my mind immediately moves beyond what jurors are instructed to consider. Once, a judge who was determined not to dismiss anyone called me up to the bench. She asked if I couldn’t put my professional expertise aside as I considered the case. I couldn’t — no more than she could have put aside her knowledge of the law.

The same thing happens when I read a mystery. When characters struggle hopelessly with alcohol, I long to get them into treatment and/or to an AA meeting. Sometimes it’s apparent to me that the author is aware the character is alcoholic. Sometimes it’s not. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and the falling down drunk stage comes late in the progression — or not at all, since that hard head or hollow leg heavy drinkers boast about is a sign of increased tolerance, one of alcoholism’s hallmark symptoms.

Consider my fellow panelists’ fictional characters. Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, for example, has been dry for the last two books. But terrible things keep happening to him. Does he go to AA? No. He periodically goes into a bar, where he orders a shot of Jameson’s and a pint of beer and sits there glaring at them. So his rage is unabated, his head remains clouded, and he can’t see the use of sobriety.

Jack’s a loner who’s experienced more than his fair share of tragedy. But if he went to AA and tried to explain that’s why recovery is not for him, they’d laugh. "Get over it," they’d tell him. "We were all terminal loners when we came in here. Every one of us has had devastating losses. You say bad things happened when you weren’t even drinking? You’d been off the sauce for five minutes when a child died because you couldn’t focus. Of course you couldn’t focus. Sobriety takes time, and not drinking is just the beginning. Forgiveness takes time too, but there’s no merit in never forgiving yourself."

Con Lehane’s fictional New York bartender, Brian McNulty, sees plenty of alcoholics in his work. They’re the guys who have to be carried home, the women in a blackout who can’t remember in the morning whom they slept with the night before. But Brian himself is not an alcoholic—or so he thinks. He doesn’t drink to oblivion every time. Sometimes he lets days go by without a drink. When he does drink, he continues to function, a sign of tolerance. He’s had blackouts, a sign of alcohol dependence. As he works, we see him topping up not just the alcohol but a little "blow"—cocaine—all evening just to feel normal. That’s characteristic of the mid-stage chemical dependent. Brian’s a decent guy, so in addition to solving murders, he struggles to be a good son, a good father, a good friend. I want to tell him, "Trying to work on relationships in your condition is like trying to swim through oatmeal. Get into recovery, stay clean and sober for a while, and see what happens in the rest of your life. If you don’t like it, as they say in AA, ‘we’ll gladly refund your misery.’"

Zelvin's Death Will Get You Sober (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books), came out this year. St. Martin’s will also publish the second in the series, Death Will Help You Leave Him. A related short story was nominated for an Agatha award for Best Short Story. Liz blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. 

To read all of the Bouchercon author posts, click here.

One had his character bricked up in a cellar, another injected a seven percent solution, and a third chased down a Maltese falcon. These great moments from revered mystery writers (I’ll assume you know who they are) inspired the latest group of authors that are descending on Baltimore for the Bouchercon conference. I’ve just joined the ranks of them, having sold my debut thriller a few months ago, but my novel won’t launch until May, so I get to wander around the halls dropping in on the panels that I find interesting.

And if there is one thing I’ve learned this past year, hanging with this crowd beats anything you could do otherwise. Granted, I’m a trial lawyer, and while trial lawyers can be fun, they are most often simply too exhausted from their killer schedules to be entertaining after hours. Especially in these past two weeks, when we all have watched a parade of similarly white-faced people stumbling out of late night meetings regarding the economic crisis. I don’t know about you, but I need a break, and a conference addressing my favorite genre of all time, mysteries, is just the ticket.

There’s a trick to the signing part, I might add. Buy the book, bring it to them, print your name on a yellow post-it and attach that to the front. This way, the hapless author won’t spell your name wrong. My name is spelled "Jamie," and I can’t tell you how many times people have tried to write "Jaime."

I’m going to cruise around, hang with my friends, hit some after parties, and generally live it up. So, if you want to read what’s going on in Baltimore with your favorite authors, check back in here, or at my web page, I’ll also upload a couple of lines at Twitter when the mood strikes. Feel free to follow!

Tomorrow at noon you'll have a chance to meet Laura Lippman and Denis Lehane at the Charles Commons Conference Center signing their latest works, Hardly Knew Her and The Given Day, respectively.

 The Southeast Anchor branch of the Pratt library is hosting a mystery and romance discussion with Heather Graham and Alexandra Sokoloff. I had the pleasure of hearing Graham's views on the convergence of the mystery and horror at a panel earlier today, and she was a lot of fun. Make sure to ask her about the Lalaurie House in New Orleans; talk about horrific.

 Later that day, Read Street's guest blogger Austin Camacho will be at the Canton branch of the library to discuss his craft. And author Laurie King will moderate a mystery panel at the Orleans Street branch, featuring Frankie Bailey, Charlaine Harris, Gary Phillips and Cara Black.

For those of you who don't live and breathe mystery, breathe books will host Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament, on Wednesday.

A typical exchange at the mystery convention sounded like lines you'd hear at a family reunion -- "I haven't seen you in a while," "Yes, I was so sorry to miss the last one," "You look beautiful! Even better than last year!" -- these people clearly relish each Bouchercon and the friends they make at them.

Even an interloper like me was welcomed.

I noticed that the attendees were mostly authors themselves. At the horror mystery panel, I sat next to an aspiring legal thriller author from Florida. Afterward, Leigh from Orlando, Fla., explained his motivation for attending.

As a new writer, "I've learned how much I still have to learn," he said. "This is a great place to come to to pick up hints on my writing." He then pointed to his friend, James, from Los Angeles, who he said introduced him to this world of mystery.

James has attended Bouchercon events for the past 10 years, and he says there's no better place for comraderie. "Essentially, we only have one type of plot: Someone dies, and then you have to figure out who did it," he said. "So we help each other out with the details."

Local author Charles Colley, whose novel Sister Baby's Monkey was recently released, summed up the appeal of Bouchercon nicely: "Writers here are very accessible. You'lll be sitting next to someone, they're chatting with you ... and then it turns out they're a best-selling author."

Robin Burcell, author of Face of a Killer (out in November), has had experience as a police officer and forensic artist. Does that help her as a mystery writer? Here's what she says: 

I've been a cop for at least a couple decades, and still work in law enforcement. Along the way I've dabbled in various cop-like duties, such as working patrol, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. It's that forensic artist skill that I decided to explore — coupled with murder and government conspiracy — in  Face of a Killer (If you're really curious, visit my website for a sneak-peak at the first chapter, as well as books from my SFPD Kate Gillespie series.)

But back to those cop-like duties. In many ways, my job makes it easier to write authentic police procedurals. Obviously the forensic art stuff I can write about. I've drawn everything from murder suspects to dead people in hopes of coming up with an identification. I did CSI work before TV made it seem glamorous (trust me, it so isn't). And unlike the majority of average citizens, I know what it's like to pull a gun on someone, feel my heart pounding, wondering if I'm going to have to kill this person I'm facing. There have been a number of times my finger has pulled the trigger, only to release it at the last second before that final click. While I've never killed anyone, I've witnessed an officer being killed. And high speed chases? Been there done that. Even crashed in a couple. So, yeah, the adrenalin-rush-stuff I get and try to include in my books. Short answer, talking and walking like a cop is easier to write about.

So what's a good cop do? Unlike my real-life police reports, in fiction I can bend those rules a tad to fit with a plot. Need to enter a building without a search warrant? Not a problem, because I can write in exigent circumstances to fit my needs. Need to skirt departmental rules to solve a case, especially the rules that'll get you fired? (Like when you're ordered off a case, but your motivation to find the murderer outweighs your lieutenant's warnings, and you run off to another country in search of the killer, because it's a way-cooler plot?) Again, not a problem. In real life? A whole different matter — especially in this economy — I do have a house payment to make.

Of course, there are those cases and incidents that just scream to be written into a book. Only problem is trying to get them to fit into your plot. If it's not the cases, then it's the people. I can't tell you how many times I have run into someone while working a case, and knew this person had to become a character in my book. (Not that anyone would recognize him or her.) Real cases are a bit different. I don't write about actual cases, but I might take parts from one, combined with another, then add a twist of my own. I won't even go into the cases that are so convoluted that if I tried to write about them, the editor would toss it back and say it was too unbelievable. And she's probably right. But that's what juries are for.

To read all our Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Twenty-one year old Caleb Fairley’s life was a flat out mess. This is all true, by the way. His younger brother had accidentally killed himself which left a huge hole in his life, Caleb had been ridiculed at school for his weight, and his mother was a nightmare of blame and recriminations. Not to mention that Fairley was avid a collector of pornography and one of those guys who lived to get lost in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. On the night of September 10, 1995, a fateful night in a number of lives, Caleb attended the concert of a gothic rock band and asked the keyboardist if he could help Caleb establish a more personal relationship with Satan. If ever there was a lost boy, it was Caleb Fairley.

Earlier on that same evening, in a small town outside Philadelphia, Lisa Manderich took her 19 month old daughter, Devon, into a children’s clothing store called Your Kidz & Mine to go shopping. I could spend paragraphs talking about their lives, their loving family, the hopes for their futures, but it’s enough to say they were mother and daughter running an errand. Neither Lisa nor Devon were ever seen alive again.

It didn’t take long for the police to connect our Caleb Fairley with the disappearance of the Manderichs. Lisa Manderich had told her husband exactly where she was going to shop and Caleb Fairley was the clerk on duty at the store.

Fairley was the prime suspect in the investigation by the time he was first questioned by the police. He denied everything, and though he had scratches all over his face, he claimed he received the scratches in the mosh pit at the concert he had attended. Everything pointed his way, yet the evidence against him was still only circumstantial and the bodies of Lisa and Devon Mandarich had not yet been found. It wasn’t until they dug up the body of young Devon in Valley Forge Park that Caleb Fairley was finally charged with murder.

The prosecutor sought the death penalty against Caleb Fairley, but nothing on the child’s body linked it to Fairley. There was the expectation that Lisa Mandarich’s body would definitively link Fairley to the crime, either through Fairley’s DNA found beneath her nails or through evidence of a sexual assault. But as the days went by, the possibility of that evidence deteriorating beyond usefulness became more and more likely. Without Lisa Mandarich’s body there was no sure route to conviction. Against the sharp wishes of the public, the D.A. offered Fairley a deal: Tell us where the body is and we’ll take death off the table.

Okay, now you’re the defense attorney trying to figure whether or not to take the deal. Remember, you don’t represent society, that’s the D.A’s job; you only represent young Caleb Fairley, lost boy. It’s a winnable case, not a certain win, but you see a definite avenue to an acquittal, which would be Caleb’s only chance of ever spending a single day out of prison. Not to mention that an acquittal would make you famous. Also you figure that with Caleb’s background and sad sack story, even if he gets convicted you’ll have a chance to save his life based on extenuating circumstances. On the other hand, taking the deal would, yes, save your client’s neck, but also consign him to prison for the rest of his life.

So quick, what do you do?

When I write about lawyers, I’m always trying to write within the gaps between guilt or innocence. Of course I throw in mystery and humor, action and sex, because these are all the things that make any life worth living, even a lawyer’s life. And yes, I am especially talking about the sex. But lawyers have their own series of questions that are raised in every case.

What does it mean to truly represent an individual? Does the truth of things really matter? Can a lost boy ever find himself? Where lies the greatest opportunity for repentance and salvation for both the defendant and the lawyer?

This is the juice in all our novels, where the facts end and the more difficult questions await. This is where the writer and reader both have to ask themselves the fundamental question that awaits all criminal defense attorneys, what kind of defense is truly in the best interests of Caleb Fairley?

My parents moved our family to Wichita in the late 1970's. The moving boxes had just been unpacked when police announced a connection among seven unsolved murders of women and even children. The man who claimed responsibility called himself BTK, a gruesome acronym, short for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Our home fell squarely within the serial killer's stalking territory. Like other Wichita children of that era, I learned some pretty dark lessons: check the phone line to be sure the wires aren’t cut, keep the basement door locked at all times, barricade yourself in the bathroom with the phone if you have to call 911.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I suddenly started reading mysteries after moving into a world where the killer could be anyone, and where an arrest appeared hopeless. My mother, a school librarian, would take me each week to the public library for a new stack of books. I moved from the Encyclopedia Brown series to Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie and eventually to Sue Grafton. In the books, as opposed to Wichita, smart sleuthing always paid off, and order was always restored.

I was still an avid reader of crime fiction years later when the First Assistant called me – at that time a rookie Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon -- into his office for a special project. Police in Washington had just arrested a man for killing his girlfriend. In the course of confessing to the crime, the man also confessed to several other murders, including the strangling death of a Portland woman five years earlier. The problem was, two other people had already been convicted of that crime.

The man’s self-incrimination didn’t stop there. He also claimed to be the author of a series of confessional letters that had been mailed to and published by a local investigative reporter, all signed with a Happy Face. I’d read the articles about those letters with the same fear and gruesome fascination I’d experienced so many years earlier in Wichita. And now I was working on an actual case: My job was to draft the documents that would explain to a judge why we needed to release the two defendants who’d already served five years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

Halfway into a long weekend of work, I found my imagination wandering. How do we know, I asked, that the so-called Happy Face Killer doesn’t know the two original defendants? Couldn’t the three of them have acted in concert? We eventually discarded the theory, but the idea stuck with me: What if?

As years passed, I continued to ask, and answer for myself, the question of "What if?" By the time I left the District Attorney’s Office, I had fictionalized that case in so many ways that I had the plot for a crime novel about a Portland prosecutor named Samantha Kincaid. That manuscript became my first novel, Judgment Calls.

Since then, I have continued to re-imagine actual cases by asking myself, But what if this, and what if that? In my most recent novel, Angel’s Tip, Indiana college student Chelsea Hart is murdered on the last night of spring break after telling her friends she wants to stay behind for one last drink in the VIP lounge of a Manhattan club. The case is caught by NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, who, by the way, was raised by a Wichita detective who spent his career hunting a serial killer who was never captured.

The fun for me in crime fiction is that I can create as much chaos as my mind -- and my willing readers -- can handle. Twists and turns abound. The unexpected always manages to occur. The likely suspect is never so likely after all. By page 250, it’s enough of a mess to create one serious mind explosion. But in the end? Wow. In the end, the story always comes together. The crime is always solved. The clues always add up. And the bad guys always get their due.

There’s a neatness and order to crime fiction that’s often missing in real life. It was missing for me as a child in Wichita. It was missing too often in my cases as a Deputy District Attorney. But it’s always there for me in crime fiction, both as a writer and as a reader. And while some of the fun in crime fiction is actually a funny kind of fun -- the practical jokes played among cops, the X-rated banter, the pop culture allusions that I love so much -- the real fun for me is the unraveling of a mystery.

The Bouchercon panel Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction, starts at 11:30 a.m. Saturday with moderator Rhys Bowen and fellow panelists, John Billheimer, Chris Grabenstein, and Tom Schreck.

For all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

During the 1980’s, I would rent a small airplane in Johannesburg and fill it with friends, wine, and food. One of the friends was Michael. After take-off, we would head for Zimbabwe or Botswana to view and photograph wildlife and birds. And to savour South African wines in the middle of the African bush around a hardwood camp fire.

In the early evening on one trip to the Savuti plains of the stunning Chobe National Park in Botswana, we witnessed lions stalking and killing a wildebeest. Right behind was a pack of hyenas, harassing the lions to get to the carcass. Sometimes one hyena would bite a lion’s tail. When the lion angrily turned on it, another hyena would dart in and steal some of the flesh. By morning there was nothing left except the horns of the late wildebeest. The hyenas had finished anything left by the lions, bones and all.

That night, over a glass or two of wine, we decided that if we were ever to commit murder, the best way to get rid of the body would be to leave it for the hyenas. No body, no case. And that suggested an intriguing premise for a mystery novel.

When I retired in 2003, I suggested to Michael that we should do something more about this idea than just think about it. A month later, I received a draft of the first chapter of a mystery novel. In it our perfect murder became imperfect as a game ranger and a professor stumbled upon a corpse just before a hyena finished devouring it. So there was a body, and there was a case. I liked the chapter and asked Michael what happened next. Michael didn’t know.

And what an adventure it was. Believing in the age-old advice that one should write about things one knows, we decided early on that the professor should be the book’s protagonist. Both of us having been professors, we liked the idea of a smart professor solving a mysterious murder in the Kalahari. It quickly became obvious to us, however, that the police would have to be involved. So in Chapter 2, an Assistant Superintendent in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Botswana Police, David Bengu by name, jumped into his Land Rover in Gaborone and set off to investigate.

By the time he arrived at the scene of the murder, Bengu, nicknamed "Kubu" – Setswana for hippopotamus for his considerable bulk – had become the protagonist. We were astonished how this supposedly second-string character took over and elbowed himself into the number one position. We were obviously naïve, because we had thought that writers controlled their characters rather than the other way around.

Kubu continued to evolve throughout the book, ending up as an appealing character, who loves his wife, his food, and his wine. He is normally placid with a keen brain and sly sense of humour, but like his animal namesake, he can be formidable and dangerous. Kubu is a policeman one does not want to cross.

From the outset, we wanted to write more than a murder mystery. We wanted readers to learn something about the sights, sounds, and cultures of Botswana. We wanted them to smell the desert and imagine the spectacular sunsets over the Kalahari. We were committed to depict this remarkable country as authentically as possible.

So we continued to visit Botswana regularly to verify the factual aspects of the book, as well as to ensure that the fictional aspects made sense in today’s environment. In all of this we were blessed with good luck. For example, the director of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department (CID), spent a whole Saturday afternoon showing us around. And what an afternoon it was. We learned about the Botswana police and a number of famous cases. He showed us the Police Training School that he had been instrumental in establishing. He gave us information about the workings of the CID and the relationship of the Botswana police with their counterparts in South Africa and Scotland Yard. And while we were touring Gaborone, he deflected repeated phone calls from a subordinate who wanted the his advice on handling a gang the police had just arrested, who were armed to the teeth with AK47s. The Director brushed the phone calls off with an abrupt "I can’t talk now. I’m busy showing some people around."

Most commentators on A Carrion Death mention Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana series featuring Precious Ramotswe. Although A Carrion Death deals with death, murder, and corporate shenanigans, which Precious would find abhorrent, it shares with McCall Smith’s books a love of this part of Africa, the dignity of its people, their friendliness, and their respect for friends and family.

We have been delighted by the positive reception Detective Kubu has received. He will re-appear in our second book, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, which HarperCollins will release in Jnue 2009. Unlike A Carrion Death, which was set in the arid Kalahari Desert, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, is set in the lush riverine forests of the Linyanti River in northern Botswana. The back story is about the turmoil in Zimbabwe and how the Rhodesian Bush War forged strange relationships, both good and evil. The story itself, set in present day Botswana, is about the dissolution of two such relationships.

To read all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Six years ago I would have told you there was simply no way I could ever write a book with a partner. Impossible. Unthinkable. Ridiculous even to contemplate. I’m a loner by nature and I have this thing about control—both in my writing, and in my life. So how did I end up as part of C.S. Graham?

Well…I met this guy named Steve Harris. Turned out he was an ex-spy. Not only that, but he’d been involved in a bizarre but very real program run by the U.S. Army: the remote viewing project at Fort Meade. It all sounded like a great starting point for a thriller series. Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — it wasn’t something I personally felt up to writing. Verisimilitude and accuracy are important to me, and I knew that if I tried to write those kinds of books by myself, I’d be making a lot of embarrassing mistakes. So the idea went on the back burner.

At the time, I was just starting to write a new series of my own — the Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series — which I publish under the name C. S. Harris (the name "Harris" is a clue to the evolution of our relationship: we got married). But while the Sebastian books are very much my own, I quickly discovered that Steve makes a great plotting partner. He was particularly helpful when it came to orchestrating chase scenes, fight scenes, and what I call "macho strut" scenes (you know, those testosterone-laden posturing scenes, where male characters show each other how tough they are). We worked so well together that I started thinking, Well, maybe I could write a book with a partner.

So how do two people write one book? I suspect there are as many different ways of collaborating with a writing partner as there are writing teams. Our particular method is one that is best suited to our own individual strengths. We brainstorm ideas together, then plot out our books together, first laying down the general outlines of the story before fine-tuning individual scenes. We talk about characterization and motivation; sometimes we even lay down stretches of dialogue. We both do research. But when it comes to the actual writing, I’m still the one who sits down at the computer and puts the words on paper.

We like this approach because it gives the book a uniform voice, and because it, ahem, satisfies my need for control. If Steve were a Type A control freak like me, the partnership would never work. But because he’s mellow, and very wise, and very diplomatic, it works just fine.

People frequently ask, So how do you handle disagreements? The truth is, Steve and I rarely disagree. When we do, we go with the opinion of whoever is the expert. Since I’ve written more than a dozen books, my opinion carries more weight on things like story arc and pacing, and Steve will bow to my superior wisdom in those areas. But Steve is the acknowledged expert on everything from spycraft to Washington, D.C., politics to guns. So if I come up with an idea and he says, "That’s impossible," or, "They wouldn’t do it that way," I drop it. Each of us also has the deciding word on characters of our own gender. If Steve suggests a line of dialogue or a course of action for Tobie, our female protagonist, and I say, "A woman like Tobie would never say or do that," he drops it. And when I’m writing a scene involving a lot of the aforementioned masculine strut, we work the action and dialogue out together in meticulous detail, to make sure I get it right.

Because our series involves both a female and male protagonist—remote viewer October (Tobie) Guinness and disgraced CIA agent Jax Alexander—some people think that Tobie is me and Jax is Steve. The truth is, both characters are a blending of both our personalities, combined with histories and quirks and talents that are all their own. In some ways, Steve is actually more like Tobie, and I’m more like Jax. Tobie has an inner peace and wisdom that reminds me in many ways of Steve; Jax is the hothead, the avowed realist with a secret dedication to truth and justice who’s been described as "one mistake away from being fired."

One of the benefits of writing together that came as a surprise to both of us is just how much fun we have "working" on our books, devising twisted new plots, doing on-sight research, choreographing fight scenes, weaving fact into fiction. Writing can be a very lonely profession, but writing together turns the books into something we share. The truth is, neither of us could have written The Archangel Project or its sequel, The Deadlight Connection (coming in the fall of 2009) by ourselves. And I’ve found that the more we work together on the Jax and Tobie series, the more I tend to turn to Steve when it comes time to write my Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series. Because the truth is, when it comes to creating fiction, two imaginations are better than one.

The toughest thing about writing in a foreign setting is putting yourself into the minds of all of your foreign characters. Even a tourist can get the sights, sounds and smells right, as long as he’s observant and takes good notes. Nailing the local point of view is another matter entirely.

About the only way to do this is to hire an interpreter and start talking to people, the more the better. You set up formal interviews, but you also strike up conversations in cafés and outdoor markets. You become a genial pest, insinuating yourself into homes and offices, or wrangling invitations to family dinners, rudely taking notes all the while.

The goal of this immersion is to craft characters that will feel right at home; personalities you will be able to don like disguises, speaking in their voices and seeing the world as they do. Your powers of observation are always tested. When people argue around a dinner table, for example, do they touch? Do they shout? Do they guard their language, or pour it on? Do women join in, or drift to the margins?

In some countries, where the outlook and way of life has remained virtually unchanged for centuries, this immersion can feel like time travel. Remote hill towns in Bosnia, with their ox carts and kerchiefed old women, take you back to the 19th century. In Afghanistan, particularly the lawless borderlands where Osama Bin Laden is supposedly hiding out, you drift a further 300 years into the past. It is a heady experience, full of wonders.

“In the weeks to come, Skelly knew, he would enter realms of old codes and unbreakable taboos. His hosts would be men wondering one minute how they might cut his throat while in the next they’d offer tea and refreshment, breaking bread pulled from a smoking ceramic hole in the ground, just as they would have done it five hundred years earlier.”

Capture these feelings while they’re fresh, and their mood will seep unavoidably into your prose.

Once you’re home, the challenge is to re-create this mindset even as you sip coffee in a suburban office, writing scenes of exotic upheaval while a school bus passes outside your window, and a lawn mower drones next door.

The key to staying focused is in your memory, of course. But it is also in your notebooks. Certain descriptions, sometimes even a word or two, can instantly unlock the mood, the smell, the sense of an entire scene or place, or the way people were dealing with one another.

It is a distillation, like a magic potion. A mere sip and you’re transformed. The school bus might as well have disappeared into a sinkhole. The sound of the mower fades. And you are again back in that bazaar, or standing in a grimy alley, seeing another world just as the locals did.

If the charm wears off too soon, your readers will know right away, because your prose will ring false, the hollow tone of forced authority. But if you become comfortable in this second skin, they will, too.

For all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to three war zones and more than 30 countries. His books have won two Dagger Awards in the UK, plus a Dashiell Hammett award in the United States. His sixth novel, The Arms Maker of Berlin, will be published in August 2009 by Knopf.