The Measure of a Man (or Woman)

by Sheila Connolly

This past week I was at Bouchercon (along with Sandy and Jeri), where as a treat for all of us not from Cleveland the opening ceremonies were held at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  The organizers were kind enough to allow us time to wander around and explore the exhibits (there might have been a riot if they hadn't).  One person later commented that people from our group tended to go around alone, as if to revisit their own musical memories in private.

 

Why is it that we are fascinated by the clothes of public figures?  I realized as I walked through the exhibits that quite often we tend to make iconic people larger than they really are, and since we are unlikely ever to encounter them in person, it's easy to do.  That's why it can be a shock when you're confronted by evidence of the real thing, er, person.  Here are some things I learned, based on clothing alone:

--Elvis was much smaller than I thought

--John Lennon was larger than I thought

--Johnny Cash had really big feet

--Somebody there loves Stevie Nicks, because they had no fewer than five of her outfits on display (I already knew she was small—and she's been wearing platform boots forever)

But then I recalled that this is not the first time I came face to face with the clothing of the greats.  More than a decade ago, to lift my mother out of a funk after her mother's death, I took her and my young daughter to France.  My mother was a lifelong reader of historical fiction, usually involving royalty, so of course we visited as many chateaux as we could fit in, with a few medieval sites for me.

 

One of our stops was at Malmaison, a small chateau that once belonged to Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoléon Bonaparte (she apparently bought it without consulting him while he was off fighting somewhere), west of Paris.  It's a somewhat obscure museum—most of the local people we asked had no idea where to find it.  In any case, we succeeded.

 

In the museum they have a uniform worn by Napoléon—and it's tiny.  He was both short and slender, and it's hard to imagine such a diminutive person leading armies and building an empire.  It says much for his strength of will and personal magnetism.

 

On the same trip, we happened to wander into the cathedral of Sens, where Thomas Becket spent much of his time in exile, starting in 1164—and there on display are some of his very ordinary clothes.  (Can you imagine keeping clothing intact for nine hundred years? BTW--I made a small contribution toward the upkeep of the cathedral's collections!)  And he was not tiny, although not large (except perhaps by the standards of his day). They even had a pair of his shoes.

When you grow up steeped in the mythologies of history-altering public figures like Napoléon or Becket, you don't always realize that they were ordinary physical people.  It is intensely moving the be able to hold up your own hand next to such displays and to find a sense of human scale across the centuries.

 

Rock stars are our current royalty, and yet, the exhibits at the Hall of Fame prove that they aren't larger than life. I'm still not sure whether I'm happy or sad to know that, but I'll admit I feel just a little closer to them. Thank you, Bouchercon committee!

 

Traveling

by Sheila Connolly



Travel just ain't no fun any more. When you read this, I should be mingling with a couple of thousand of mystery and thriller writers at the annual Bouchercon convention in St. Louis. I say "should" because you never know if you will arrive at your intended destination (or you’re your luggage will be there). Things happen, as we have been reminded this week. Disasters, natural and man-made, disrupt the best-laid plans.


It's easier than it used to be to get from Point A to Point B. Once you needed human assistance to reserve a space on any conveyance—boat, train or airplane. Now you can sit in front of a computer and arrange to go anywhere. Several years ago I booked a flight to Australia, and all it took was a couple of mouse clicks. Somehow I felt that there should be more drama when committing to flying halfway around the world, but all it took was a single "Enter" to make it happen.


I know people who are terrified to fly. Admittedly it is unnatural, getting into a shiny tube and hurtling hundreds or thousands of miles through the air. The human brain did not evolve to encompass such things. I don't know if it takes faith or fatalism or willful denial to climb onto a plane and expect to walk happily off at the planned destination, but thousands of people do it every day (one source says there are 30,000 commercial passenger flights every day!). I find the whole thing unreal and managed to distance myself mentally from the reality—after all, you're at greater risk on a local street than on an airplane, right?


But terror or inconvenience does not quash the desire to go somewhere, or to be somewhere else, whether it is for business or pleasure. I suspect that in the future more and more business will get done electronically, now that you can call meetings on-screen and look your client or competitor in the eye. But travel for pleasure is something different: you want to experience being there, or of not being where you usually are.

If you are familiar with Golden Age mysteries, such as those by Agatha Christie, you will know that many authors set stories in what was once the pinnacle of luxury means of travel—cruises along the Nile, the Orient Express. These books are populated with a certain class of people, who expected everything to be made easy for them. Have you ever looked at steamer trunks from the old days? They are huge, and they weighed a ton. Obviously no gentleman, much less a lady, could be expected to haul those around. That's what porters and bellmen were for. A discreet bill slipped into a palm, and the humungous objects were spirited away, to be found in an opulent hotel room, where a maid had neatly upacked milady's garments and ironed the ones that needed it. Did that world ever really exist? Not for most of us.

In 1958 my grandmother made a grand tour of several European countries, for business: she was showing off the Lipton Tea collection of antique silver, which she had assembled for the company. I suspect it was a bit of a boondoggle, or at least a parting gift for her, as she retired that same year. She took the (original) Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth—we have the 8mm movies to prove it. And she took with her a matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage. Let me tell you, those things are heavy—a person can stand on them. No way was my five-foot-four grandmother dragging those up gangways. She was, however, an expert tipper.


Save for a very few lucky people, this is not the average travel experience. Now you can get on a plane and walk off five or ten or fifteen hours later and be in a very different place (assuming you survive being squashed like a sardine for that time period). More time for exploring the destination, you say? Perhaps, but you've missed the fun part of luxury travel—the elegant meals, the games, the hairdresser a few decks away; the flowers sent to your stateroom; the telegrams wishing you bon voyage. Something's gained, but something's lost as well.


I really hope I'm in St. Louis now. With my luggage.

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

The UC Berkeley campanile

by Sheila Connolly

I just spent a week in San Francisco, attending the Bouchercon writers/fan conference. I’m not going to write about that, wonderful though it was, since many people have already reported on it, more promptly and better than I could. But I allowed myself one free day to sightsee, and I want to talk about Berkeley.

Yes, that Berkeley. Years ago, not long after my husband and I married, we lived in California, in the East Bay. It’s easier to just say Berkeley, but we couldn’t afford that neighborhood, so we lived in UC student housing in Albany, and then in an apartment in Richmond, and finally in a house we bought in El Cerrito (and left before the earthquake!). But Berkeley was always the center of the universe. I worked there, both on campus and in the city, and I took classes there, even got a degree there. So that was what I wanted to see in my few precious hours of free time. The BART stop was directly in front of the conference hotel, and it was an easy 20-minute ride to the heart of Berkeley.
It’s an interesting experience, revisiting a place you knew well, once upon a time. Things change, of course, although the memories remain strong in your mind. It’s like watching a slide show in your head: you’re looking at the current reality while images of the past flash over it.
There were surprises. Sure, I remembered the Cal campus. At one point I held two part-time jobs, one in a building at the very top of campus (across from the nuclear reactor, looking out over the Hayward Fault. Don’t ask.), one downtown, and I used to walk from one to the other (parking in Berkeley was next to impossible even then). But I had conveniently forgotten how far apart things are, and how high the hill is. Obviously I was younger and fitter then. Sigh.
The Cal campus hasn’t changed as much as I expected. The trees are bigger, but there’s still a guy in Sproul Plaza ranting about how big cars and big oil are destroying the world; still street vendors selling odds and ends (mostly earrings); still homeless people panhandling on Telegraph Avenue. Sadly, Cody’s Books there is long gone, but I knew that, and I walked far enough to pay homage to its shell.

The menu I used to drool over

One of my long-cherished goals was to go to Chez Panisse. For those of you who aren’t foodies, that’s Alice Waters’ iconic restaurant in Berkeley, where she all but single-handedly launched the local food movement a generation ago. My husband and I ate there a few times, back when the prix fixe dinner was something like $15. We took our daughter there to celebrate her first birthday (yes, she was a Berkeley baby), so I can tell you almost to the hour the last time I was there, and I can even remember what I ate (pasta primavera). I dedicated my most recent Orchard series book, in which I create a local-food restaurant in a small New England town, to Alice Waters. The restaurant is still there, and still thriving—and the food is still very good.

There were only two additional memories that connected past and present for me in Berkeley. One, I could point to the precise place where our @#$%& Chevette died, on a three-lane, very busy street in the middle of town. The bleeping PCV valve decided to croak right there, and without it the car didn’t work, period. The other: I remembered where I had a dentist who made three gold crowns for me. He was something like head of the UC dental school, but he did what amounted to pro bono work for starving students, and we qualified. I still have all three crowns, in good shape—a lasting (and solid gold) souvenir of my time there.

Berkeley was never “home”, and I arrived a bit late to embrace Robin Williams’ famous line, “if you remember the sixties you weren’t there,” but it was great to visit and retrieve old memories before heading back to the Bouchercon madness.

Missing Bouchercon in San Francisco

Elizabeth Zelvin

Mystery lovers are gathering in San Francisco today for the annual celebration of crime fiction, and I’m at home in New York, missing all the fun. To make it worse, the San Francisco Bay Area itself is one of my favorite places in the world. The Bay Area consists not only of what its inhabitants call “the city” (shocking as that is to New Yorkers, who think “the city” can have only one meaning), but also of East Bay, including Berkeley (which in its hippie heyday many called Berserkeley) and Oakland; Marin County to the north (beyond the Golden Gate Bridge), the home of est, hot tubs, Mount Tamalpais, and Muir Woods with its giant redwoods; and the Peninsula, including Palo Alto, San Mateo, and a host of other towns. Even San Jose, almost fifty miles to the south, is considered part of the Bay Area.

In fact, I can’t help wondering if Bouchercon will be as convivial as usual, or if participants, instead of hanging out and bonding at the con, will slip away to sightsee and visit friends. If I were there, I know I would be torn. I made my first trip to the West Coast in 1975, a little late for the Sixties, though I managed to catch the trailing edge of it. I traveled on a hippie bus called the Gray Rabbit. I wore blue denim and brought my guitar along. I stayed in Berkeley, first in a cousin’s communal household and then in student housing, in a suite along with several graduate students including a seismologist. I gave my very first poetry reading at a grungy coffee house on Telegraph Avenue, which abounded in street people (whom nobody called “the homeless”) and street vendors. I experienced my first full-body hug from a woman friend (would you believe we didn’t hug yet in New York in 1975?), my first hot tub, and my first clothing-optional social event. For years afterward, I thought one could only do these things in California.

Thanks to my seismologist roommate, I became fascinated by the fact that San Franciscans went about their lives knowing that “the Big One,” ie an earthquake as severe as the one that almost destroyed the city in 1906, might come at any time. I imagined the inhabitants of Pompeii before 79 AD as very much like the San Franciscans, going about their business with just enough denial not to consider moving elsewhere, even though they knew it was going to happen one of these days.

My most recent California visit was in 2008, the occasion my first mystery book tour. The Bay Area is rich in mystery and independent bookstores. I did talks and signings at several of them. At Book Passage in Corte Madera, my competition was Salman Rushdie. You can still see the photo of the two of us on my website. At Dark Carnival in Berkeley, I struck up a conversation with a customer who, it turned out, lived at Greyhaven, the SF and fantasy community started by Marion Zimmer Bradley. As Bradley herself told the story, her friends and family were sitting around one day, and somebody said, "Who needs to go to a writer's conference? We've got one right here around this table!" At M Is for Mystery in San Mateo, where the friends who showed up included at least one fellow therapist, we put the chairs in a circle and had a wonderful discussion. I was featured at one of Janet Rudolph’s famous At Homes in the Berkeley Hills along with Simon Wood and Michelle Gagnon.

Various circumstances kept me from Bouchercon this year. But I’m sending a big virtual hug to all the readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, and mystery aficionados gathered at the Hyatt Regency for the next four days. I wish you all a wonderful time—and I have no doubt whatsoever that my wish for you will come true.

Blunt Talk about Women at Bouchercon

Sandra Parshall

Sara Paretsky’s big black hat, red feather boa, and interesting footwear caused a lot of comment at Bouchercon last Friday, but as always, her words had the power to make you forget the visuals. Along with moderator Barbara Fister and writers Mary Saums, Kate Flora, and Liza Cody, Paretsky turned a panel with the deceptively dull title “Telling Women’s Stories” into a riveting dissection of women’s roles in fiction and real life.

Paretsky, who joined with other female mystery writers to found Sisters in Crime 24 years ago in response to “being slighted at conferences” and overlooked by reviewers, sounded as if she’s given up on feminism. She said she believes SinC has brought a lot of women readers to mystery by making them aware of books that will appeal to them, but she questions ”whether feminism has made much of an impact” on society. Joking that she was “raised in the woods by wolves” and has “never felt at home in civilized society,” Paretsky spoke in the past tense of being a feminist who was “angry all the time” about the unequal treatment of women. Now she’s more focused on general issues of power and justice – and her protagonist, V.I. Warshawski, has changed along with her.

Other women on the panel agreed that inequality remains rampant in society at large, in the publishing world, and on the pages of novels. Mary Saums said she’s weary of witnessing “everyday abuses of women’s rights.” For the first 45 years of her life, Saums said, she was a “nice” woman, but she finally reached a point when she’d had enough of conforming to expectations. “Women have a right to be who they are,” she declared to applause from the audience.

All of the panelists deplored the prevalence of women characters as victims of brutal crimes in fiction, but none seemed to find it surprising. Paretsky pointed out that “the notion of a woman taking up space in the world still offends some men at such a visceral level” that they want to strike out, “slash and destroy.” Both men and women, Liza Cody said, “are quite comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” but men don’t want to read about male victims.

Kate Flora said she finds it “deeply troubling” that female authors are “increasingly writing about women as victims” of graphic violence. In her own Thea Kozak series, Flora is “exploring what it means to be a modern woman.” In a new series, her male detective owes his sensibilities to his mother, who “taught him to see” the reality of men’s and women’s roles in society.

Mary Saums perceives “a new wave of anti-female feeling in the book business” and some of it is coming from women. Popular female thriller writers are treated as the equals of their male counterparts, but some of those women, according to Saums, are openly critical of Sisters in Crime and “talk down to us.”

In society, Liza Cody fears, too many young women are moving backward. Rather than claiming the right to be unique individuals, they’re “trying to compete with porn stars” in a bid for male attention. (I couldn’t help thinking of the young female cops on TV shows who teeter around crime scenes on five-inch heels and lean menacingly over interrogation room tables with their cleavage fully exposed, inches from the suspects’ faces. The porn star effect is everywhere these days.)

Paretsky observed that both male and female writers all seem to want their women characters to be “five-six and 118 pounds.” She believes publishers are “not thoughtful” about what they publish, but simply put out more of what’s already selling until it stops selling. If books in which women are savaged happen to be selling, publishers will put out more of them. Publishers follow trends instead of taking the lead and breaking new ground.

The mostly female audience responded to the panel with frequent applause, and when the floor was opened to questions, a couple of the women present seized the chance to make speeches of their own.

All this was in marked contrast to an earlier panel called “The Dark Side of the Fair Sex” that featured Megan Abbott as moderator with panelists Chelsea Cain, Sophie Littlefield, and the lone man, Derek Nikitas. Cain, who writes about a gorgeous female serial killer named Gretchen Lowell and the mentally unbalanced male cop who both desires Gretchen and wants to lock her up, seemed amused by readers’ reactions to her characters. (She reported that her grandmother’s comment after reading the first book was that “it’s nicely bound.”) All of the panelists write dark, gritty stories about women who don’t meet society’s expectations, but I didn’t sense the struggle and frustration that was palpable when Paretsky, Saums, Flora, and Cody spoke. Why the difference? That’s food for thought in itself.

And the winner is...

Sandra Parshall

Meryl Streep said recently that “there’s no such thing as the ‘best’ actress” and that “everybody wins” in a year when many great movies provide showcases for talent. Of course, she said this while accepting a best actress award from the Screen Actors Guild, but there is some truth and good sense in the statement. It’s wishful thinking, though, to imagine that creative people can rise above the competitive streak that is an inborn aspect of human nature.

Writers aren’t exempt from the craving to outshine one another. Maybe we’re not as cutthroat about it as movie and TV people, but would most of us trample the bodies of our beloved grandmothers to get to an Edgar Award? You bet. If you win a single award of any kind, you will be labeled forevermore an “award-winning author” – regardless of whether you continue to turn out good books or never produce another that’s halfway readable.

I’m thinking about all this because it’s that time of year again, when Malice Domestic registrants are filling out their Agatha Award nomination ballots and everybody’s looking at the just-released list of Edgar nominees and saying, “Huh?”

The campaigning for an Agatha nomination usually takes the form of e-mails and mystery e-list posts “reminding” everyone that a writer’s book is eligible for a nomination. When the reminder is coming from a personal friend, it’s hard not to feel pressured. Sometimes I think writers expect a nomination simply because they’re friendly with a lot of the people who will do the nominating. But what if you don’t think your friend’s book is one of the five best of the entire year? You don’t have to say so, of course, and no one will see your ballot except the person who counts it. The whole situation is uncomfortable, though -- and unnecessary. If I think a book is terrific, I’m going to remember it. I don’t need to be reminded of its existence.

The Anthony Awards given out at Bouchercon, and many other crime fiction awards, are the result of the same sort of process. Attendance at a conference, or membership in an organization, or even a subscription to a mystery magazine, gives a person the right to make nominations. A lot of factors influence the nominators – friendship, subgenre preferences, biases that have nothing to do with the quality of books (“I don’t like violent books, or books with graphic sex, regardless of how well-written and well-plotted they are”), and, most important, the limits on how much a person can read in one year. If you haven’t read every crime novel published in the last year, how can you choose the best?

That brings us to the Edgars, which are awarded by committees. Every year both writers and fans complain about the nominations. “I’ve never HEARD of most of these books! How can they be the best?” (I hope you see the fatal flaw in that reasoning.) “Why don’t they ever nominate a cozy?” And so on. The refrain is the same, year after year.

I’ve done my share of grousing when a book I loved – for example, Laura Lippman’s wonderful What the Dead Know – is nominated for (and ultimately wins) just about every other award in existence but doesn’t receive an Edgar nomination. I don't always agree with their choices, but I have to respect the simple fact that the Edgar judges do read every eligible book that is published and submitted by publishers for consideration. Each unpaid judge in the novel categories suspends normal life for a year and reads hundreds upon hundreds of books before choosing the five she/he considers best. As I understand it, a period of discussion and perhaps re-reading follows to reconcile disagreements among the members of a particular panel, and ultimately they arrive at a list of finalists. Then they choose the winner in that category. It’s not surprising that this laborious process usually produces nominations for serious books that display outstanding, original writing and in some cases tackle social issues.

Lighter books will have a chance at other awards. A mystery or thriller doesn’t have to be life-changing to be great entertainment. It doesn’t have to pulsate with psychological or social significance that will outlast the ages. Each award has criteria, and the people making nominations have to keep those criteria in mind. You wouldn’t nominate a Karin Slaughter book for an Agatha. That doesn’t mean the Slaughter book is worthless. You can’t expect to see a cooking cozy get an Edgar nomination. That doesn’t mean the cozy isn’t entertaining (with great recipes included). And if your own book receives no nominations, that doesn’t make it a failure. Mystery writers might be happier if no awards were ever given, if we weren’t forced to applaud for authors whose books were deemed “better” than ours. Awards are here to stay, though, and all we can do is try to be realistic and sensible about them.

Would I give up my own Agatha Award? Are you nuts? Will I fill out my Agatha and Anthony ballots this year? Of course. Will I be annoyed if my favorites don’t win? Of course. I’m only human, after all.


In case you’re interested, the book I’d like to see win the Agatha for Best Novel is I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming.







My favorite for the Anthony is Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook.

Which books are you rooting for this time around?

The Bar at Bouchercon

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve just returned from my first time at Bouchercon, mystery’s biggest annual convention, which draws hundreds of writers and even more hundreds of fans. I’ve heard over and over that the best place to network at Bouchercon is the bar. This has presented me with a dilemma, since I’m an alcoholism treatment professional whose debut mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, is about recovery. Who would I meet at the bar but people who drink too much? It was an educated guess, since in more than twenty years as a therapist and program director I’ve been exposed to the pain and tragedy of hundreds, even thousands of men and women who met their alcoholic loved ones—or a series of disastrous loves—in just that way.

But I was wrong. As I realized within half an hour of sailing through the lobby of the Sheraton Baltimore City Center into Shula 2, a subdued but not dim or smoky space so packed with mystery lovers it resembled, as we say in New York, the IRT at rush hour, I realized that at Bouchercon, the bar is not where people go to drink. It’s where they go to schmooze. And hey, I was born to schmooze, so I fit right in.

As early as the Wednesday night before the convention’s opening day, the bar was packed three deep and every table filled. Some folks were drinking beer. Others were eating dinner. And the rest, like me, were talking a mile a minute about crime fiction and writing and everything under the sun.

Kaye Barley from Boone, NC, a reader well known on the e-list DorothyL, reported afterward to the list: “There was a group of us sitting around a table just talking and feeling so totally comfortable with one another that we decided to pass on going to the Lee Child Reacher Creature party to just continue sitting around getting to know one another and enjoying one another’s company. It was lovely.” It was indeed. It was Kaye’s first Bouchercon too, and, like me, she’s already signed up for Indianapolis in 2009. That group, by the way, included authors Shane Gericke, Robert Fate, and Gwen Freeman.

What else happened in the bar? British author Stephen Booth recognized me as one of his MySpace friends, and we had a long conversation about cabbages and kings. Reed Farrel Coleman and I bonded on the topic of blowing off a major Jewish holiday because we didn’t want to miss a thing at Bouchercon. And I know he went home happy, because he won the Shamus award for Best PI Novel.

I ate delicious crab soup and seared tuna and exchanged life stories with my roommate, Kate Gallison. (Kate’s new series set in the age of silent film, written under the name of Irene Fleming, is coming from St. Martin’s in 2010.) We were strangers when we agreed to room together. “Never met” is the wrong phrase in this age of online relationships. We didn’t have one of those beforehand either, but it was a match made in heaven. We talked nonstop and will surely room together at future cons. I met Joe Konrath, whom I got to thank for one of the three best tips ever for authors going on book tours: Get a GPS. When I told him about how Sadie got me to my destination all over the country, was never wrong, and never lost her temper, he confided that his is named Sheila and that they, like Sadie and me, have lengthy conversations on the road.

I had wonderful conversations in the course of the event in numerous rooms and corridors and restaurants. I hugged Ken Bruen in the lobby and had a long talk with Donna Andrews about cultural competence in social work (really) at the St. Martin’s Minotaur party. And I had a peak experience in the Ladies signing a copy of my book for Poe’s Deadly Daughters regular Caryn St. Clair. For the record, it wasn’t her fault. On the contrary. She told me she’d won the PDD basket at the silent auction and asked if she could wait outside. I’m the one who said, “Are you kidding???” and whipped out not only my signing pen but my camera as well. So thanks, Caryn, for making the day of this first-time author.

But if you come to Bouchercon Indianapolis, especially if it’s your first time and you’re feeling shy and friendless—you’ll find me in the bar.

So What is Bouchercon, Anyway?

Jeffrey Marks (Guest Blogger)

Bouchercon, the yearly world mystery conference where authors and fans of all types of mystery meet and talk about their favorite books, will be held in Baltimore this year. The conference was named after Anthony Boucher, a renaissance man in genre fiction. He mastered the novel, the short story, radio, and genre criticism in a short, but full life. Following Boucher’s death, the mystery community decided to honor him by starting a conference in his name.

Since its inception in 1970, the world mystery convention has drawn in over 35,000 mystery fans, authors, and publishers. The annual conference, better known to fans as Bouchercon, has grown from a few hundred fans to the largest gathering of crime writers in the world.

The first Bouchercon hosted 82 mystery fans and writers, including Robert Bloch as guest of honor for the conference. Bloch and Boucher had known each other for years through their mutual love of science fiction.

After the first year, the conference was moved to the fall to avoid conflicts with the annual Edgars dinner, held in late April in New York City. The conference was a success, in that they had enough funds to plan a second Bouchercon and then a third.

It wasn’t until 1976 that I first heard of Bouchercon through a series of newsletters from mystery booksellers. All of them had stories of the generosity of spirit that embodied Anthony Boucher. Everyone involved in mystery and science fiction had a kind word to say about Boucher and a volume of those tributes could easily be compiled. A number of tributes came out after Boucher’s death in 1968 and continued over the next decade.

It was no wonder. Boucher was a tireless force for genre fiction. He not only wrote mystery novels, but penned a number of mystery and science fiction short stories. He wrote radio plays for both Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen. He founded one of the preeminent science-fiction magazines and started a true crime magazine as well. He translated the mystery works of authors into English for magazines, and of course, he reviewed mysteries and science fiction for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times.

It took another 16 years for me to attend my first Bouchercon in Toronto in 1992. The 23rd annual convention was no longer an intimate gathering of mystery fans. Over 2000 people jammed into the Royal York hotel. It was a formidable sight to see people ebbing and flowing through the panels, discussions, and book dealers’ room. The convention had added a Guest of Honor, Margaret Millar, and a Toastmaster, and a Lifetime Achievement award. I had the opportunity to sit with a table of writers at a banquet which hosted its own “best of” awards, appropriately called the Anthony awards.

Still, even with the addition of more mystery-related events in the four-day event, it felt as though something more had been lost. Many people no longer knew who Anthony Boucher was and what he represented to the genre. I frequently heard attendees refer to the event as “Boo-cher-con” instead of the proper “Bow-cher-con”.
Some ties to the past remained. In the last several years, the Bouchercon committee has come up with a memorial to Boucher, so that new members might know who he was and his place in the genre. Phyllis White, Boucher’s widow, was still given membership number one. She faithfully attended the event, but as time progressed, fewer people could pick her out of a crowd. Sadly, she passed away in 2000 and no member of the family has taken her place.

Even as direct memories of Boucher fade as time goes by, his reputation lives on. Bouchercon continues to thrive in its fourth decade. Boucher is still widely regarded as the best mystery reviewer for the New York Times. Mike Nevins recently collected his reviews for Ramble House, a project that was long overdue. His magazine, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, still publishes some of the best genre fiction available.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to miss this year’s event, but I’m on the planning committee for next year’s event in Indianapolis. I am looking forward to seeing all my friends there.

Jeffrey Marks is the Edgar-nominated author of Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of the Screwball Mystery, Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and the recently published Anthony Boucher. Marks has written novels and short stories in addition to his history of mystery series, which looks at the lives and writings of some of the most popular authors of the middle years of the last century. His website is: www.jeffreymarks.com.

Are conferences worth the money & time?

Sandra Parshall

A popular mystery writer once said that her agent told her she could either be a “conference slut” or she could pick one or two conferences to attend each year and spend the rest of her time at home, writing. She chose the second course, and it certainly hasn’t hurt her career.

I remember her words when I see a newly published writer struggling to attend as many conferences as possible and still get the next book written.

As I wrote last week, mystery conferences are fun, and they give us a chance to see friends and take a break from the isolation of writing. But the number being offered is staggering. Some are strictly for fans, with published authors trying to be entertaining enough in their panel performances to send the audience first to the book room, then to the signing line. Others are aimed at aspiring writers who want to learn from published writers – and again, the authors participate in the hope of selling some books and making themselves better known.

In virtually every case, writers have to pay their own way. A lot of mystery writers out there, especially first-time authors, are spending their entire advances and much more on travel and conference fees. It seems to make sense – after all, if you don’t get a rave review in the New York Times and your publisher won’t buy big splashy ads for your book, you have to get the word out somehow, don’t you?

But does it benefit the average writer’s career if she turns up at half a dozen or more conferences every year? Will she sell many books at those conferences, or will she always sit at her signing table, twirling a seldom-used pen and watching the bestselling author across the room autograph tall stacks of books? I don’t know the answers, not even for myself, since Malice Domestic and Bouchercon are pretty much it for me.

I’d like to hear from other writers – and fans – about this.

If you’re a writer, how have you chosen the conferences you attend? Do you think those appearances have given your career a boost? Do conferences take you away from your writing?

If you’re a fan, do you feel as if you see too many of the same writers year after year, or do you look forward to seeing familiar faces? Have you discovered any new-to-you writers at these events?

For both writers and fans: Which conferences are on your must-go lists, and why?