Fear & Loathing & A Lot of Books in St. Louis

~Post by MysteryPeople Crime Fiction Coordinator Scott M.

I’m holed up in a Steak & Shake forty-five minutes from the scene of the crime, physically drained from a four day cycle of coffee-fueled mornings, booze-induced nights, four hours of sleep, then repeating. My voice is shot, my mind bleary. Memories come into vague focus; being with thousands of crime fiction fans, over a hundred of them good friends and authors I admire, great discussions about books, lots of laughs, things that can’t be repeated. Okay, I just pulled my annual stint at Bouchercon, the world’s biggest crime fiction conference, and I’ll try to recall it all.

This year was special for me in several ways. It was held in St. Louis, where I was born and raised and escaped from. It was the first time I went there as the Crime Fiction Coordinator for MysteryPeople.  (I found out that word has gotten around about our experiment, and most of those words were good.)  I was honored to participate as a volunteer this year, with the special sobriquet of Stunt Coordinator.  2011 Bouchercon Chairman and Crimespree publisher Jon Jordan asked me to be the crazy guy for ideas. I learned this year that being “the crazy guy” next to Jordan is an exercise in futility, but his insanity created one of the best and smoothly run Bouchercons ever.  His warning the hotel bar staff about us is an action of diplomacy we’ll always be thankful for.

Most of my duties involved two panels I moderated. The first one was about the relationship between the western and the mystery. I was happy to have my friend Lori Armstrong, who won this year’s Shamus Award for Best Novel for her great book Mercy Kill, participate.  Ann Parker, Jackie King, and Lori brought up an interesting discussion about women characters in western fiction. It was also an honor to include of my favorite authors, Robert Randisi, who wrote the Delvecchio private eye series and has written over three hundred westerns. He claimed that the hero in his series, the Gunsmith, hasn’t really been updated; he still has to sleep with a different woman every thirty pages. When I then asked how that character has continued for over thirty years while most adult westerns have dropped off, his response was, “Well he does respect them in the morning.”

Thursday evening I got to make history with a special evening panel. Entitled “Bad Seed:  Sex, Violence, & Bad Language; Everything That Makes A Book Great,” we looked at how authors use those elements in their books. Not only did I get to moderate the panel, but I also chose the authors.  My choices paid off.  Benjamin Whitmer (Go out and read Pike, if you haven’t) brought up some insightful points about violence in literature and in life. The great S. J. Rozan, who ended up with our motley crew due to clerical error, held her own. She talked about when her readers complained about the language of some street kid in her her book. “They wanted to deny who these kids were and where they came from for their own clean ears.” The topic of sex was thoroughly discussed, with plenty of banter between Scott Phillips and Christa Faust.  Anybody in attendance will never view birthday candles the same way again.

We wrapped up the conference with our Anthony awards brunch where I was able two congratulate two of my friends. The lovely and talented Hilary Davidson won for Best New Novel for The Damage Done. The not as lovely but just as talented Duane Swierczynski won both The Crimespree and Anthony awards for Best Paperback Original for his hardboiled time travel tale Expiration Date. Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead won for Best Novel and a new category, Best Graphic Novel, was won by Jason Starr’s The Chill.

What I love about these conferences is meeting new and upcoming writers. After a few months of fun facebook exchanges, I got to share a few beers with Frank Bill, who was luckily less ferocious than the characters he writes about in Crimes In Southern Indiana. I’ve already decided he’s one of the most down to earth guys in a group of great people. After meeting Chris Holm on my panel and reading his Anthony-nominated short story “The Hitter”, I can’t wait to read his horror laced crime novel, Dead Harvest. The book I can’t wait to read is Last Call For The Living, a Deep South crime novel by Peter Farris, who I hit it off with at the bar.  The book will be out early next year. A man who loves Sam Pekinpah films as much as I do has my respect.