Bouchercon

Posted in Forensics, Precious Blood, Uncategorized by Jonathan on October 16th, 2008

Well, I’m back from Bouchercon, the annual crime fiction festival, this year held in Baltimore and run by Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine and Judy Bobalik. It was my first Bouchercon, but I felt not so much “virginal” as (whatever the single word adjective you’d use to describe someone arriving in the Big City for the first time, and feeling a bit disoriented and lost amid all the bustling crowds). It was a bit bewildering, but there was a tremendous sense of community, and everyone was super nice – like, Midwestern-level nice.

I arrived Thursday afternoon, and was ecstatic to get there, at least in part because I drove down with Alafair Burke; Alafair is, to be frank, certifiably psychotic at the wheel, her need for speed almost carnal in its urgency. The combination of high speed daredevil manoeuvres (at one point, she drove under a semi just so she could slam us up the ramp of an empty car transporter trailer, shooting us up about 20 feet high, hurtling through the air to land squarely 8 inches in front of the black Tahoe that had irritated Alafair by dawdling in front of her for a good two minutes). (Seriously.)

I checked into the Sheraton, which was actually not bad for a chain hotel – the common areas had all the elegance of a feed auction in Topeka <tm a joke I made at the time>, but the rooms were pleasantly modern in their style, and the bathrooms were quite handsome. Unusually inoffensive for a chain hotel! Of course, the widescreen LG TV was set to Standard Definition, with the images all stretched to fill out the screen space, something I HATE! If your signal isn’t in widescreen, set your set to Academy Ratio, darnit all to heck!

I checked in with my publicist, Harper’s wonderful Heather Drucker, then milled about a bit with Alafair, but  I was exhausted, so when she and her coterie headed out to dinner, I disappeared to bed. Roomservice steak, serviceable, some awful TV vampire movie with that blonde sweater girl from that Star Trek spin-off. Jeri Ryan? Something like that.

Friday morning at the crack of dawn (8:30AM), I joined authors John French (Baltimore PD Crime Lab), ex-cop Lee Lofland, all around force for good Cody McFadyen and Gwen Freeman, pinch-hitting for Sheila Lowe (both Sheila, a hand-writing analyst and forensic artist Brenda Robertson Stewart were felled by food poisoning, an epidemic of which shot through the assembled ranks like melted butter through a loosely-packed Jumbo Bag of popcorn) to discuss the way forensics in movies, TV and books relates to the real world. (In brief, many forensics folks hate how fake it is, I personally like it because it often captures the spirit of what we do, and it makes us look absurdly glamorous – and hey, what’s not to like about that? I’ve written about it a few times, most recently in a blog for the Baltimore Sun, and previously for New York magazine. And I actually believe what I said!)

Despite the obscene hour, a good time was probably had by everybody – it was too early to make rigorous judgements like that. It was good to finally meet Lee, whose blog, the Graveyard Shift, is a fantastic resource for all things police and forensics-related; Lee’s book on police procedure is aimed at writers, and is a goldmine for, uh, writers. I’m going to try to persuade him to let me make the occasional guest post on the Graveyard Shift.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. I saw a bit of various assembled friends; people seemed to accumulate in the lobby as overflow from the overcrowded restaurant, and then move on to other places. I saw quite a lot of Tasha Alexander (that blonde hair is like a flag), J.D. Rhoades, Jonny Santlofer, Megan Abbott, Dan Conaway, Joe Konrath, Meredith Cole, Michael Koryta, Sean Chercover, Mark Billingham, Michelle Gagnon, Sarah Weinman, Tim Maleeny  – y’know, I’m going to stop now. It’s going to KILL me to add in the URL’s to everyone I’ve just listed! I saw lots of great writers, in short.

There’s a really interesting (at least to a newbie) and palpable hierarchy to the event. Well, not so much a hierarchy as a finely-pitched sense of celebrity, an awareness of superstar success. Lee Child just has to lean against a door frame in his elegantly lanky way to trigger waves of psychic attraction; he becomes more apparent simply by standing still. And Harlan Coben strides affably through the halls, his smooth dome poking above the heads of the crowd like an iceberg in a flat sea; even if you didn’t know what they looked like, it’d be easy to spot the million dollar-plus advance crowd.

That probably sounds bitchy, but I really don’t mean it that way – one of the hallmarks of Bouchercon (based on my huge experience of the thing) is the friendliness of the participants, and the willingness of authors to stop and chat. I never once saw either Child or Coben not talking and smiling with fans or with other writers. It felt good to belong to that brother/sisterhood (to the extent that a novice author can consider her- or himself as belonging to that community).

In the evening, I went to the Harper dinner at Cinghale, a slightly swank modern Italian restaurant. I got to meet (breathlessly!) the amazingly cool Val McDermid ; I cornered her and told her about how worried I’d been when some critics found Precious Blood gory, and then how relieved I’d been when I read The Mermaids Singing, her first – Crumbs! And people said my book was gory! She was supernice, in line with the conference’s Nice Mega-authors theme. As was Laura Lippman, who I’m sure I terrified with my fanboy ravings about The Wire, created by her husband David Simon and Ed Burns.

I had a fun table, including Billingham, and it was great to finally dine with the notorious Otto Penzler, New York City icon and King of the Mysterious Bookshop. He would’ve been an entertaining enough companion on the mystery chatter front alone, but that he should be an informed and opinionated foodie was just gravy…

After dinner, hmmm… I took a taxi back to the hotel with Otto, Tasha, Andy Gross and Jonny Santlofer, then we milled around for a while before making our way to the Reacher’s Creatures party for Lee Child. I was fading fast by that time, and went home to crash not long after 1AM.

Now I’m fatigued from all that writin’ and linkin’; I’ll finish the rest of Bouchercon tomorrow…