Congratulations to Eve, PK and Carla, who won our Bouchercon-inspired giveaway of mysteries. Up for grabs were three books by Read Street guest posters: Trigger City, a new release from Sean Chercover; Angel's Tip by Alafair Burke; and The Archangel Project by C.S. Graham. 

We asked entrants which type of sleuth they preferred: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade or Miss Marple. Miss M. was the favorite, though Spade got some love, too. Carla, meanwhile, voted for her husband -- uh, Carla, has your conscience been bothering you lately? Something you'd like to tell us?

As Marple fan PK said, "crime solving is relationships -- not just talking to people which is how you get such interesting characters but also ... the connections between all the suspects and the victim(s)." 

Our next giveaway starts Monday with a quiz about Baltimore's literary heritage. See you then.   

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Glynn Marsh Alam, author of the Luanne Fogarty mysteries, left Baltimore a little disappointed this week. She wrote: "I was at Bouchercon and expected to find lots of Poe memorabilia in the hotel gift shop among many other places. I actually found nothing, not even a postcard or a t-shirt. We walked to the grave site and found nothing there or on the way. I wondered why Baltimore or someone living there hasn't picked up on the money maker? Surely there are items made in China. I guess I [didn't expect] something on the scale of Elvis, but to find zero was a surprise."

I don't know any Poe shops. (I consider Ravens football jerseys to be Poe memorabilia, but that may be a stretch.) I have a call out to our Poe museum; I could point her to Richmond and Philadelphia, but I'd rather keep the business here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Edgar Allan Poe
        

Online chatter about the Bouchercon conference -- and Baltimore -- has been very positive. Folks enjoyed touring the city, and perfect fall weather certainly helped. When I joked on the DorothyL listerv that some people might have stayed home after seeing episodes of The Wire, I got this response from British author Natasha Cooper:

"Having read about Baltimore's high murder rate and seen some of The Wire, I'd had a few moments of silent panic here in London about what I might find when I crossed the Atlantic. What I actually found was a great city, basking in wonderful sunshine. We walked to Mount Vernon and saw rows and rows of beautiful old houses, went to dinner in Fell's Point, basked on the edge of the harbor and had a really good time."

This from a writer who deals with murder and gore for a living? (Her latest book, A Greater Evil, has this plot summary: Abandoned as a baby and brutalised in care, sculptor Sam Foundling is the obvious suspect when his wife is beaten to death in his studio.) Actually, I'm sure she was partly kidding about our rep, and I'm glad B'coners had fun in our overly maligned city.

But maybe Cooper has unwittingly found a new marketing opportunity for the city -- at least one aimed at mystery writers. One possible slogan: Plot in a rut? Visit Baltimore for new ideas on  mayhem!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Laura Lippman has won more accalim for her latest novel, What the Dead Know, and her short story "Hardly Knew Her."

Her book (reviewed by Nancy here) was named best novel in the annual Barry and Macavity awards, which are voted on by the readers of Deadly Pleasures and Mystery News, and members of Mystery Readers International, respectively. It also won Best Novel in the Anthony Awards, which are named for Bouchercon founder Anthony Boucher.

She won the Anthony for Best Short Story for "Hardly Knew Her," which is contained in a new collection of the same name (discussed here by Dave). 

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As a thank you to the many folks who stopped by Read Street during the Bouchercon conference, we're giving away several books by some of the more than 20 authors who were guest posters.

Up for grabs: Trigger City, a new release from Sean Chercover; Angel's Tip by Alafair Burke; and The Archangel Project by C.S. Graham. 

To enter the giveaway, somply post a comment (with a short explanation) on this question: Who's your favorite type of sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade or Miss Marple?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
        

Wandering through Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was impressed by the love and loyalty that conference-goers held for the mystery genre. And every author I bumped was down-to-earth, funny and entertaining, the kind of folks you'd want to relax and have a beer with. In that spirit, I hereby create Mystery Monday on Read Street, and promise to feature the genre each week.

For the first MMoRS, here's Louis Bayard, author of The Black Tower, on Edgar Allen Poe, whose "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is seen as the birth of detective fiction. In 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth. there will be a renewed focus on the noir master, and we'll be writing more about that on Read Street. But first, Bayard recounts a Poe sighting (of sorts) at Bouchercon:

This morning, I was approached by a young man bearing an Edgar Allan Poe action figure.  I very nearly wrapped him in a bear hug because I had the exact same action figure sitting over my desk when I wrote The Pale Blue Eye, my fictional account of Poe’s days as a West Point cadet. 

Continue reading "Louis Bayard on Poe" »

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Today's the final day of Bouchercon, the international conference that brought hundreds of mystery writers and fans here. Throughout the week, visting authors have been writing guest posts about their experiences and about the craft of writing. Our sincere thanks to the more than 20 authors who contributed. 

This doesn't end our Bouchercon coverage -- tomorrow we'll give away books by several of our guest posters, and Nancy is preparing some video of the conference. Meanwhile, here are some highlights and insights:

"A good mystery novel makes you stop and think, how will the hero solve this puzzle? A good horror novel makes you stop and think, should I check the locks?" — Mario Acevedo, on combining horror and mystery.

"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?" — Dan Fesperman, on writing about foreign locales.

"Hard-boiled detectives are always outsiders, but in the case of black detectives, it's easy to understand why. White clients may expect them to have a hidden, anti-white agenda. Other African-Americans, distrustful of authority figures in general, sometimes have a special resentment of black men who question them or try to associate them with crimes." — Austin Camacho, on race.

Continue reading "Bye-bye Bouchercon" »

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Before we end Bouchercon, let's pay tribute to the man for whom the conference is named. We turn to Jeffrey Marks, who has written a biography of Anthony Boucher, for insight into this "tireless force for genre fiction":

Bouchercon, the annual world mystery conference where authors and fans of all types of mystery meet and talk about their favorite books, was named after Boucher, a renaissance man in genre fiction. He mastered the novel, the short story, radio, and genre criticism in not only mystery but science fiction. Boucher suffered from ill health his entire life and passed away at the age of 56 from lung cancer. Following Boucher’s death, the mystery community decided to honor him by starting a conference in his name.

The first Bouchercon hosted 82 mystery fans and writers, including Robert Bloch, best known as the author of the book on which Psycho was based, as guest of honor. Bloch and Boucher had known each other for years through their mutual love of science fiction.

The following year the conference was moved to October to avoid conflicts with the annual Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar dinner, held in late April in New York City. The conference was a success, in that they had enough funds to plan future conferences. Phyllis White, Boucher’s widow, was still given membership number one and she attended each Bouchercon until her death in 2000.

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Continue reading "Deborah Crombie on Bouchercon" »

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Continue reading "Jonathan Santlofer on getting it right" »

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Tasha Alexander's  characters hearken from another time, which can be limiting when your heroine is in a tough spot. Back in the day, no too many women packed heat. Thoughts from the author of Elizabeth: The Golden Age and A Fatal Waltz:

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. 

Continue reading "Tasha Alexander on pistol-packin' mommas" »

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Sean Chercover is the author of Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City (out next week), but is relatively new to writing novels. We asked him to talk about starting out (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): I know writers who can tell you inspiring stories about how they queried hundreds of agents and kept submitting and never gave up until their walls were papered with rejections and their persistence finally paid off. I wish I could inspire you with a similar story. But the truth is, getting published wasn’t that hard.

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…

Continue reading "Sean Chercover on the first time" »

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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.

Continue reading "Andrew Gross on changing careers" »

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Elizabeth Zelvin, author of Death Will Get You Sober, is a psychotherapist who has directed alcohol treatment programs, including one on the Bowery. So she's the perfect person to discuss the role of alcohol in crime novels. Her view: 

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.)

Continue reading "Elizabeth Zelvin on sobriety" »

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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.

Continue reading "Jamie Freveletti on Bouchercon" »

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When I walked into the middle of Bouchercon 2008 at the Sheraton City Center, I was greeted with smiles and books. It was heavenly. Co-chair Judy Bobalik told me that they had roughly 1300 registered attendees, and every one that I talked to was friendly, helpful and very, very talkative.

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."

Posted by Nancy Knight at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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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.

Continue reading "Robin Burcell on cop work" »

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William Lashner, author of Blood and Bone, has also worked as a prosecutor. Here he talks about the space between guilt and innocence (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): When I write about lawyers and the law, or talk about writing legal thrillers as I will be doing with a brilliant group of lawyer-writers at a Bouchercon panel on Saturday morning, I always think back on the sad case of Caleb Fairley.

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.

Continue reading "William Lashner on guilt" »

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Alafair Burke, author of Angel's Tip, has seen crime from a prosecutor's vantage point. Saturday at Bouchercon, she'll be on a panel called Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction. Her take: For me, the fun of writing crime fiction comes from a sick collision between my childhood in Wichita, Kansas, under the shadow of a serial killer, and my years as a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon.

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.

Continue reading "Alafair Burke on asking "what if?"" »

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Continue reading "Jonathan Hayes on blood and guts" »

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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.

Continue reading "Stanley Trollip on long-distance collaboration" »

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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.

Continue reading "Candice Proctor on collaboration" »

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We continue on the topic of writing with Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent. His five novels, including The Amateur Spy and The Prisoner of Guantanamo, have settings in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the Middle East. Here's Dan:

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.

Continue reading "Dan Fesperman on foreign locales" »

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Today, our Bouchercon author posts deal with the craft -- and art -- of writing. Leading off is Hallie Ephron, author of Never Tell a Lie (for all author posts, click here). Here's Hallie: I'll be on a panel revealing the inside scoop -- what we wish someone had told us about this writing business, back when we weren’t too deep into the woods to turn back.

So, here’s my scoop: It doesn’t get easier. Even with seven published books and my first standalone psychological suspense novel, Never Tell a Lie, due out in January, writing a novel is still the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

Sure, I no longer struggle with the mechanics of writing. Point of view and internal dialogue are no longer my enemies.

But one thing doesn’t go away. Somewhere in the middle of each manuscript (and often more than once) I get stuck for weeks, sometimes months, in a “what happens next” rut. I know because I’m stuck there now with my current work-in-progress.

When I was writing Never Tell a Lie, I’d gotten my nine-months-pregnant protagonist locked in a windowless attic. For months she languished there while I tried in vain to write her out.

I was determined that her means of escape would not require “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God” (all prohibited by the esteemed Detection Club oath). She could not scale the wall and burst through the roof because, though she was that desperate, it had to be in character and believable (remember, she’s nine months pregnant). No white knight (police, neighbor, husband, friend) could gallop in on horseback; she had to save herself.

The only good news was that whatever escape I finally managed to engineer, it was going to surprise the hell out of the reader because it was going to surprise the hell out of me.

Continue reading "Hallie Ephron on the writing life" »

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Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
        

Mario Acevedo, author of The Undead Kama Sutra, is among the authors mixing mystery and horror genres. Here's his take on the stew (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here):

Weasels Ripped My Flesh is not the latest name given to the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. Rather, it’s a Bouchercon panel on which novelists Maria Lima, Kat Richardson, F. Paul Wilson, Heather Graham, and I will discuss mixing mystery and horror. (Being writers, we stole the weasel inspired title from Frank Zappa though we cover our butts by calling this rip-off an homage to his musical genius.)

So why mix mystery and horror? I feel they complement one another, as do a knife and a stabbing. What greater shock, what greater horror than coming home and finding your spouse murdered? Unless you did it. In which case you may stop and admire your handiwork. The wounds. The blood spatter. (It helps to think like a mystery novelist.)

Mystery is the who-done-it. Horror is the creepy tingling crawling up your arms. A good mystery novel makes you stop and think, how will the hero solve this puzzle? A good horror novel makes you stop and think, should I check the locks?

As novelists, we write fiction, which means we’re professional liars. As mystery novelists, we spend a lot of time thinking about killing people and how to get away with it (hence why we practice so much lying). Add horror to our stories and no wonder we’re known as creepy professional liars.

Continue reading "Mario Acevedo on horror" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
        

Charlaine Harris has seen a lot of success, both with her wildly popular book series featuring strong heroines including Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard and Harper Connelly; and the new HBO drama based on the telepathic Stackhouse, True Blood.

Harris has made the crossover between mystery and horror look easy, and that's no easy task. Many genre readers -- and writers -- are notorious for sticking to their comfort zones, but Harris predicts that those "rigid reading parameters" won't be around for long.

"I think the crossover field is blooming," she said. "I don't know what the attraction is ... But many, many readers seem to enjoy the blending of mystery and science fiction that's being called 'urban fantasy.'

Mystery readers seem to be able to accept a little more sexual content in urban fantazy than is general included in conventional mysteries, too," she adds.

Continue reading "Charlaine Harris talks about sex, 'Blood' and mysteries" »

Posted by Nancy Knight at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
        

Carolyn Hart, author of Death Walked In and Ghost at Work (released this month), is on a Bouchercon panel about crime fiction's role in revealing the darkness of human emotions. That topic, she says. goes straight to the bedrock of mysteries and mystery writing (for all author posts, click here):

Mystery novels, from the most hard-boiled to the most genteel, all spring from the same truth: Humans succumb to evil and evil destroys.

It isn’t fashionable in our secular world to speak in terms of evil, but evil - or the dark side of the moon - is at the heart of all mysteries. Yet, where there is darkness, there must be light or the depth of the darkness cannot be seen. The detective in a mystery novel represents goodness or the hope for redemption.

When the detective sets out to solve the crime, the detective seeks to understand what fractured the relationships among those involved. The focus is not murder. The focus is what went wrong in these peoples’ lives. What dark emotions caused this turmoil?

Human failings - anger, deceit, jealousy, greed, denial, deception, selfishness - destroy relationships. In a traditional mystery, murder is the exaggerated symbol for the outcome of ordinary, everyday quarrels. In real life among ordinary people, greed does not usually result in murder, but an overpowering hunger for money or sex or excitement twists and corrodes character. A quarrel in real life does not usually end with a stabbing, but the results of that quarrel can affect a life or lives for generations.

I write about the effects of jealousy, anger, greed, fear, lust, and treachery among ordinary, everyday human beings, neighbors, friends, family. I am not interested in aberrant personalities. My province is the world of everyday life and my characters are a selfish sister, a mean neighbor, a false friend, an overbearing boss, a cruel family member, an adulterous husband or wife.

The world I know and write about is a world made up of all human emotions, including humor and lightheartedness and happiness. In Ghost at Work, a new series which will debut later this month, my protagonist is Bailey Ruth Raeburn, an impetuous, redheaded ghost, who comes back to earth to help someone in trouble. My editor describes the book as whimsy with a mystery.

Continue reading "Carolyn Hart on good vs. evil" »

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Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
        

Mark Billingham, writes the detective Tom Thorne series among other thrillers, and his latest novel is In the Dark. He has always enjoyed conference panels that were a little bit different, so at Bouchercon, his topic is lying. (For all author posts, click here.) His take:  

Writers lie for a living, right? So I thought it might be fun to see how well they could lie to a live audience. The idea is simple: each of the writers on the panel – myself, Karin Slaughter, Chris Mooney, Laura Lippman and John Connolly – will reveal secrets in a variety of different categories, but we will each be slipping in three lies. Big ones, little ones, who can tell? Some truths will be so outrageous that they might sound like lies and some of the lies will have the disturbing ring of truth.

Each of us will talk about our secret skills, secret recipes and secret admirers. We will reveal our dirty secrets, our ugly ones as well as what each of us believes to be the secret of happiness. But we will also be lying our asses off and hoping that we can get away with it. If not…it’s going to cost us.

If, at any point, a member of the audience thinks that they have caught a whiff of bullshit, they are at liberty to stand up and shout “Liar!” If they are wrong, they must drop two dollars into one of the buckets being passed around the room, but if they are right the lying writer will have to cough up ten! All money raised will be donated to the Pratt Library in Baltimore, one of the Bouchercon charities, so each accusation, successful or otherwise, will be made in a good cause.

Continue reading "Mark Billingham on lying" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
        

For Caroline and Charles Todd, the mother and son writing team who write the Ian Rutledge series, including A Pale Horse and A Matter of Justice (on sale in December), police procedurals are second nature. So while Bouchercon is on, we asked for a guest post (for all author posts, click here). Their view:

There are always problems getting your police mystery “just right”. Much of what police do is about as exciting as mud: writing reports, double checking evidence and interviews, looking at files, waiting for forensics, attending meetings where nothing happens of the page-turning variety to keep a reader enthralled.

To sell, a murder mystery has to be fast paced, electrifying. The old cops and robbers at its best. If an author must skim over the boring stuff to achieve that, it’s literary license. But that license comes at a price. It’s important to keep the essence, the feel of what happens when a real crime is being investigated. You also have a responsibility to your characters, these men in blue who people your novel. There’s a tendency to make them more macho, more burnt out, more devious than they are in real life, and to some extent, that’s all right. After all, it’s a book. But how far over that line can you go without losing touch with the reality? That too must be addressed. 

There are restrictions on using weapons in real life police work. Restrictions on the way evidence is acquired. Restrictions on physical contact with suspects and interviewees. Etc. And here it becomes another question. How believable will your characters be, if you transgress these restrictions? In short, you are dealing with a rather inflexible framework, in which you must create a make believe world that entertains and still lives up to the recognizable world that your reader sees in newspapers, on TV, on the street corner and in squad cars every day.

Continue reading "Charles Todd on police procedurals" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
        

All week, we'll feature visitors from Bouchercon's Charmed to Death international conference of mystery writers (for all their posts, click here). Here's Washington author Austin Camacho, discussing how far race goes in defining his characters. His topic: Black Ain’t Nothing But a Detective’s Color. 

"It’s not about race. It’s about the characters. It’s about the mystery.”

That statement has become a mantra for me since I started writing detective fiction. Hannibal Jones, my fictional private eye, lives and works in Washington DC. Yes, he has African ancestors. He is also a hardboiled gumshoe in the MacDonald mold – Ross or John D., take your pick. He describes himself as a troubleshooter, a defender of the weak. In this sense his literary forebears include Simon Templar and Travis McGee. The archetype is familiar and the conventions clear. I take great pride in the complex, clue-laden puzzles I have crafted for novels like Blood and Bone and Collateral Damage. Yet when people talk about Hannibal’s stories, they always want to call him a Black detective, as if that were its own genre.

If my work must fall into a subgenre, let it just be hardboiled detective fiction. That means my hero lives in a dark, gritty world. It’s the part of the world most of us don’t visit much. Organized crime is a powerful force there, part of an underworld subculture. Violence is an everyday thing; corruption is everywhere; and people tend to be hostile instead of helpful. It takes a special kind of man to walk though all that muck and not get dirty. Hannibal Jones is such a man, and contemporary Washington D.C. is such a place. True, the District does have a large African American population, and that does mean that crime is organized differently. Violence grows from different motivations, and racial tension is the source of much of hostility in the District. The fact that Hannibal works in the African American community means he can’t do things exactly as Sam Spade did.

There’s also a social element to hardboiled detective stories. They often revolve around the friction between upper crust society and the lower economic levels. The relatively honest, survival crime of the streets meets the higher level corruption of the wealthy or political elite. Early writers illustrated this in San Francisco. Both Hammett and Chandler created tales of petty thieves and confidence men getting used and then destroyed by corrupt businessmen. I try to work the same elements on the East Coast, where Washington D.C.’s poor live side by side with the upper class. The conflict is real, and it takes a special man to walk in both worlds without getting crushed between the two. Sometimes one group is disadvantaged more because of color than income, and having money doesn’t automatically propel a person into the upper class. In fact, a black man or woman who is financially successful may face prejudice from both sides. Hannibal, born of an African American solder and his German national wife straddles all these lines, but never really fits into any one camp.

These stories always include action, and it’s often brutal. The hero has to be able to take a beating as rough as one he might hand out. Unlike TV, people really get hurt and the reader sees it up close. Fans of these stories know what really happens when a bullet hits a man in the chest, or a fist smacks against someone’s jaw. And the effect is the same from a white fist as it is from a black one, isn’t it? Except that bystanders are more likely to choose a side if they look like one of the fighters and not the other, or if they perceive the attack to be a hate crime. So, even a simple fight scene must be written differently if the combatants are different colors. Even if they’re not, African Americans do it differently. More trash talk, fewer bottles or car antennas, and a very different style of knife-fighting.

Continue reading "Austin Camacho on black detectives" »

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Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
        

To mark the Bouchercon "Charmed to Death" conference in Baltimore, visiting (and local) mystery writers will be posting on Read Street all week.

Dan Fesperman (shown here), a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent  wihose novels have been set in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Guantanamo, will discuss writing about a distant place. Austin Camacho, who lives in Washington, will talk about African-Americans in mysteries. And many other writers will take a turn on Read Street.

Have a question about mystery writing? Post a comment here and we'll ask our guests. And stay tuned all week to learn secrets from the masters of mystery writing.

Photo from danfesperman.com

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

I wrote recently about a local union's push to disrupt the mystery writers convention in Baltimore, by asking attendess to boycott the convention hotel. At risk is an October event that could draw as many as 2,000 attendees, including Lawrence Block and Laura Lippman.

This week, I talked about the issue with Jon Jordan, who with his wife Ruth (they also run Crime Spree magazine) organized Bouchercon 2008. He said the contract for the hotel was signed in early 2005. After the hotel changed hands and became the Sheraton City Center, the union dispute broke out, and the convention was caught in the middle.

Reneging on the contract would be disastrous, he said. "This has nothing to do with us being unsympathetic to the union. We can't afford to breach this contract. ... It would bankrupt us."

Continue reading "Bouchercon -- the latest" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
        

A Baltimore-bound convention for mystery writers -- which will feature Lawrence Block and Laura Lippman -- is taking heat from a hotel workers union. The Bouchercon gathering will be based at the Sheraton City Center, where workers and managers have been squabbling over a new contract since 2006. The union has pressed  for a boycott, and has been contacting convention attendees to ask that they not "sleep, meet or eat" at the hotel.

Convention organizers aren't budging. "We are not willing to break the law, dismiss contracts signed in good faith, or jeopardize Bouchercon to do this," says a statement on the convention blog. And Barbara Peters, who with husband Robert Rosenwald will receive a lifetime achievement award, charges the union with harrassment. She told me in an e-mail that union lobbying of attendees "cuts right to the heart of redefining Right to Privacy plus regulating the practices of labor unions who are aggressively seeking to claim or reclaim power. It is wonderfully ironic that the convention they are currently targeting is a gathering of crime and mystery writers, no? This stuff is meat and drink to us, not poison!"

Yolanda Carrington, a boycott organizer, says the union used the convention's publicly available online list of attendees to make contacts. "Nobody is using underhanded methods. ... We have not stolen information. We have not stalked people."

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death