New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges, Bouchercon 2015

by Paul D. Marks

Before I get to the question at hand, I’d like to congratulate Art Taylor and Catriona McPherson on their award wins! So...congratulations! Well done—though I prefer mine medium rarified.
 
Ah, thoughts on the recently deceased Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, NC.

To go or not to go—to this or that convention—that is the question. We decided to go, hoping for the best all the way. Of course you never know what kind of riff raff you’ll run into on an airplane. We ran into this guy—Kevin Burton Smith of Thrilling Detective (see pic below)—who had the seat right behind me on one leg of our trip, which gave him ample opportunity to kick my seat and heckle me.

And we had a great time at the convention. Seeing old friends, making new ones. We saw people from this blog: Alan Orloff and his wife, Catriona, Susan. Art and his wife, Tara. Wish I could have met up with Meredith, but next time! And we hooked up with Amy’s parents and one of her sisters, who drove up from Georgia for dinner, the night before B’con started.

The Shamus banquet was a hoot, as always. And I recorded my story “Howling at the Moon” for Ellery Queen’s podcast. I ain’t no actor, so hopefully I did okay. I would have preferred James Earl Jones do the reading and he wanted to, but unfortunately he had a previous commitment.

Every convention has its challenges. My biggest challenge this time around was trying to figure out what my panel was all about. The panel was called “New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges.” That could be about anything.

Of course, everyone wants to get on a panel, myself included. And I was excited to get on two panels this time. Unfortunately, both were skedded for exactly the same moment in time. And I really wanted to do some Star Trek thingy—excuse my lack of expertise in TrekTalk but I don’t know what the term would be—where I could split myself in two and do both panels, but alas there’s only so much of me to go around—so I was deleted from one panel, just backspaced out and asked to moderate the other. I got volunteered.

Now if you’re on a panel called “The Changing Face of Publishing for Writers and Readers” or “The Resurgence of the Traditional Mystery” or “Just the Facts: The Police Procedural,” it seems to me you’d have a pretty good idea what the subject is that you’re going to be talking about. But “New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges” could be just about anything. So, I asked my panelists what they thought it meant and they couldn’t figure it out either. Anxiety grew exponentially: what will we talk about? Especially as not all of the panelists were really what I would consider new faces, including me.

So after much deliberation and consulting a higher authority—Yogi Berra—who said: “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else,” so we wound up someplace else and I decided we should talk about new faces and semi-new faces, new challenges and new crimes and how one gets away with those in the age of CSI and DNA. But from all reports I heard it went pretty well. And I was happy that we got about 30 people there since Megan Abbott and others were paneling at the same time.

So I was very happy that the panel went well. And really everything at the convention and the whole trip went well. We had no major glitches, which is always nice. We stayed on a couple of days after Bouchercon ended to explore Raleigh. You can see more about that on my Sleuthsayers post at www.Sleuthsayers.org on Tuesday, October 20th.

We got home just a couple nights ago and, as my mom used to say, “It’s good to go and good to come home.” And when we pulled in our driveway the other night and saw our house and anticipated seeing our animals that’s exactly how I felt: There’s no place like home.

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