Malice 24

Or as far as I'm concerned Malice 1.  It was my first time in Bethesda, MD, hanging out with the traditional mystery crowd and I loved it.  Absolutely loved it.  Can't wait til next year already.

On Sunday morning, I was on a panel with Donna Andrews, Elena Santagelo, Mike Befeler and Avery Ames.  Occupy Malice.  Look - there's a picture and everything.
 

Then there was the panel - Elvis and the Commies - that I was moderating and once again I forgot to take any pictures at all.  So once again againI had to stalk and pounce at the signing session.  Here they are and here's me, Forrest Gump.  First, Joelle Charbonneau (blues suede shoes just out of shot)

Deborah Sharp (watch those racoons scatter)

Lane Stone (bless her heart and butter her butt)

And Lois Winston (we weren't auditioning for a cartoon job, despite the fact that we both look as if we've just been hit with an anvil)

Cathi Stoler and I paired up for the mind-frying experience of Malice-go-round, speed-dating 200 readers in two minute bursts of 8 at a time.  By the end of the session Dandy Gilver and Joey "Bones" Biscottini seemed like much the same thing.  Here's Cathi, completely recovered, at the Agathas banquet, standing between lovely Vicki Doudera and silly Jessie Lourey. 

I am so tired now that if someone pinched me I would cry.  Partly it was staying up late to watch Sharktopus   on Friday; partly setting up a breakfast meeting with my editor on Saturday for 7.30am EST which was 4.30am real time for me.  But mostly it was because of Jessie Chandler and Terri Bischoff:

Terri (in the blue) gave away Midnight Ink books at the banquet, and Jessie (in the green) wrote the one that kept me reading until half-past three after I'd been a good girl and gone to bed just after midnight.  Tchah!  Mind you, it's just as well I was exhausted on Sunday, because brand-new writer Michelle Sandford's work-in-progress sounded so delicious that if I'd been firing on all cylinders I might have been tempted to steal it.  It was especially great to meet Michelle because it's not every day you find another person who loves Dorothy L Sayers and Stephen King.

Now it's back to the grind.  I edited 132 pages between the two flights, 171 to go, but at least my desk is bigger than a cattle-class tray-table and the coffee's a lot better too.

Felted head-wreck

Since I'm heading off to my first Malice Domestic tomorrow, and it's by all accounts pretty craft-tastic, and since I just today finished Dandy Gilver No. 8 (working title Dandy Gilver and A Goodly Measure of Brimstone) so am in a wow-8-really? kind of mood, I thought I'd look back over the last seven covers as re-imagined by my pal Louise who has been making unsettling crafts to go with every new book since 2005.

It started innocently enough with the cover image of After the Armistice Ball on a felted cushion.

For Book No 2, The Burry Man's Day, she went 3D with a Dandy Dolly.  Now, dolls always creep me out a bit, especially when you walk into a room and they slowly turn round and stare at you, but this one was quite harmless, with her pink flapper dress and her long beads.

Then came Bury Her Deep and the spookiest finger puppets ever felted.  One of my nephews reached out for one at the launch party, then though the better of it and ran away.

Another change of pace for The Winter Ground, with a big-top desk-tidy for keeping small items like Tunnock's teacake badges safe.  (Tunnock's teacake badge model's own.)  It was cute, colourful, soft and dumpy and hardly unsettling at all.

Louise was saving up for the big one.  The odd-eyed, sock eared Dandy Dolly #2 (she's back and this time she's angry) that goes with  The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains.  DD2 doesn't even have to look round slowly at me when I go into my study to give me the heeby-jeebies.

So you can imagine my trepidation on publication day for An Unsuitable Day for A Murder.  I kind of wanted to ask the UPS guy to wait with me until the parcel was open and the contents, if necessary, locked in a cupboard.  But Louise is messing with me.  Look:

A pretty, wearable (and often worn), hearts and flowers and measuring tape brooch.

I wonder what she'll do for the next one.  Fabulous prizes if you guess.

And we get to call it working!

So Left Coast Crime 2012 in Sacramento is over and we're all on our way home, light of wallet, croaky of voice and pink of eye.  I thought I'd avoid all three this time because I was driving back to my own bed every night.  Turns out that it's the buzz that causes the insomnia - not the hotel - and when you can put your back seats flat and fill your car with signed books you spend more than the cost of a room easily.

It was a wonderful convention - fun panels, good coffee and a sea of friendly faces wherever you turned.  Many thanks to Cindy Sample, Robin Burcell  and the Sac Sisters in Crime for the one or two little things they might have done to get it organised.

Even Sacramento itself put on a good show.  The sun shone for nearly ten minutes on Saturday:

 The rest of the time the rained poured down, the wind cracked its cheeks and mystery writers and readers stayed inside and made their own fun.  Banqueting, for example:



Here are Vicki Doudera, Shannon Baker, Keith Raffel, GM Malliet, and Jess Lourey (looking lively) and me (looking like someone who's been fished out of a river and propped up) doing just that.

Others chose to pass the time by winning awards.

Darrell James' Nazareth Child (Midnight Ink) won the Eureka! for best debut (and best acceptance speech too).

Ann Parker won the Bruce Alexander for best historical, with Mercury's Rise (Poisoned Pen) and also the best excited squeal of the weekend, despite stiff competition from the cheerleaders who were having their own convention next door.

The award-winning Donna Andrews won a Lefty award for The Real Macaw (Minotaur (yeay!)), the latest in her award-winning humourous mystery series to win an award.  This is me, fished out and propped up, trying to see if some off it would rub off.

And finally:

the lovely Kelli Stanley won the Golden Nugget for best California mystery for City of Secrets (Minotaur (woop)).  Here she is with Hillary Davidson, who doesn't need anything to rub off and so must just have been being friendly.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that it was all hugs and laughs and apple martinis.  There were scary moments like this one too:

Yes, I finally met Jacqueline Winspear and Rhys Bowen whose golden-age-style British female detectives have been intimidating me for years (as well as mopping up some awards that Donna Andrews missed).  Well, neither was actually scary of course and didn't mind sitting beside a propped-up corpse to have their photie took.

In short, four days of fascinating, entertaining, inspiring, rib-tickling communion with writers and readers and bloggers and reviewers and publishers who all love crime novels.  The highlight for me? 



Without a doubt, the vision of retro-chic that is Stacey Aaronson.  Isn't she lovely?

Sprung!

The sap is rising, the geese are getting fat.  Or it feels that way to me anyway.  I'm still not in tune with the seasons here.  One the one hand:

a pear tree in blossom, definitely spring.  And:

 

the new, rhubarb-coloured leaves, tender and gleaming, on the roses.  That says spring too.  On the other hand:

broad beans (aka fava, liver and chianti beans) also in blossom.  This means summer.  As does:

rosemary covered with flowers and bumblebees.  And in the vegetable garden:

cabbages, brussel sprouts, cos lettuce, self-seeded rocket, garlic almost ready to harvest and chard that's been in there for a year and is still going strong.  What season is that?  I'll tell you.  It's the season they were watching out for in The Chrysalids; it's cats and dogs and ghostbusters.  In short, it's no' right.

And then there's the fact that there are houseplants outside in the open air acting like they're not houseplants at all:

Ah well, that's California for you.  And I've got the poppies to prove it:

 

Happy new seaon, whatever it is.

Lee's, Lee's! Lyrics won't please.

Hiya,

I'm guest-posting today on dying for chocolate with a recipe for macaroon bars.  I made them for a literary salon at Janet Rudolph's recently, because Val McDermid was the guest of honour and I thought she might be missing them.  You know because it had been days and days since she'd been in the UK where they're sold.  (Sense is optional.)

Now, macaroon bars are made in Glasgow by a firm called Lee's and when Val bit into one she burst out in a spontaneous round of the Lee's song.  I'd forgotten it.  Blocked it out perhaps.  But I'll share it with you here.  It's not on Janet's site because when you're invited over as a guest there really are limits to what you should do.

Ahem.

Lee's, Lee's, more if you please.
All of us beg on our bended knees.
For piccaninnies and grandpapas,
It's Lee's for luscious macaroon bars.

Yes, really.  And the thing is, being written in Scotland in the 1960s, not only is the word offensive but it's so gratuitous there's no way to explain how gratutious it is.  Scotland - even Glasgow - in the 1960s was about as mono-ethnic as it's possible to be.  Even now, in large parts of Scotland you look around and all you can think is "Where's everyone else?"  So it was an offensive reference to people who weren't even there and didn't need to be referred to.

Maybe the good people at Lee's like the sound of the word.  Like pernickety and rambunctious.  Some words are fun to say.  And being unfettered by any sense that maybe Black kids (when they were actually there) could just be called . . . you know . . . kids, they bunged it in.

Maybe.  But consider this:  nobody in Scotland says Grandpapa either.  And in a Scottish accent it doesn't rhyme with bar anyway.  So what was going on?

I think the song might have been written by someone who had been observing our earth and was ready to make contact.  Lee's was a front.  They thought they'd slow us down with a sugar offensive and then swoop in. 

They picked the wrong country.  Macaroon bars are admittedly quite sweet, but to a nation of children brought up on sugar sandwiches as a healthy lunch, rhubarb sticks dipped in egg-cups of sugar as a fruity snack, and tablet for treats, they didn't have a prayer.

Anyway, check out the recipe at dying for chocolate, won't you.  But be warned.  Your kitchen will end up looking as if the sugar aliens have landed.

Writers retreat.

No, I didn't forget the apostrophe; it was a sentence.  Sometimes writers need to retreat, to retire from the world and do two things.  Here is the award-winning and generally fabulous Spring Warren doing one of them:


And the best-selling and also generally fabulous Eileen Rendahl doing the other:


I've never been a retreating writer, mind you.  I'm all alone in a house, looking out at the fields and hills every day.  My whole life is a retirement from the world.  What I need to do sometimes is advance into it, to coffee shops and libraries and book groups.  But I'm open to persuasion and when Eileen and Spring asked me to join them on their latest retreat, I got right into the spirit of the enterprise:

   And something about it was oddly familiar.

I'd never been to Petaluma before.

I don't think I'd ever stayed in a Sheraton before - Hilton Garden, Radisson, Hyatt, Holiday Inn - yes.  Somehow, Sheratons had eluded me.

I know I'd never been asked what would happen if someone was being chased through a desert by haunted oxen.

But something about being in a room with other females, eating sweeties and helping each other with our homewo- 


Aha!  That's it.  It's been a long time since I lived with Sheila, Audrey and Wendy but a big bunch of girls still feels like home.  Sheila, Audrey, Wendy and me were a slightly bigger bunch, but we were considerably smaller girls.  We could all have sat on the end of a hotel bed without it collapsing:

(No writers were harmed on this retreat and many words were were written.)

Oh, yeah . . . books!

Amongst the kindle vs tree discussions, death of the midlist articles in professional magazines, plagiarism scandals blowing up all around and - I'm not kidding - a blogpost on how to write how-to articles, I managed to spend the first month of 2012 writing 2000 words a day and sitting by the fire in the evening reading books for pleasure.

As follows:

At the end of the Christmas holidays, - 12th night; I know how to stretch a feast! - I was still reading Meat: A Benign Extravagence by Simon Fairlie.  Fascinating stuff as a famer and omnivore sets out to get to the facts behind the slogans about meat eating, social justice and sustainable food production.



Straight on to Alan Bradley's I am Half-sick of Shadows and then one I've been looking forward to since last September when I met the wonderful Donna Andrews and found out that as well as her bonkers birds series she's written four mysteries featuring Turing Hopper, an artificial intelligence program detective.  The first -You've Got Murder - is just splendid.  Turing herself is an engaging character and the limitations and frustrations of her life make for a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout the novel that fits perfectly with the mounting tension of the plot.



At this point I found out that Val McDermid was coming to Berkeley and decided to re-read The Mermaids Singing.  I'd forgotten how good it is, especially the structure and pacing.  For me structure (and pacing) are like film scores.  If they're terrible, they ruin it; if they're pretty good, I don't notice them; only if they're fantastically brilliant do I ever think "Boy this is fantastically brilliant".

  This book is a masterclass on handling tricksy structure without it seeming tricksy, just exactly what you need to read when you're writing a new book.  It made all things seem possible.  And so I decided to go back to the first Kate Brannigan novel Dead Beat and re-read that too.  Also a great book, not such a great idea.  Inspiration tips over into intimidation so gently you don't know it's happened until you're sitting at your computer eating chunky kit-kats dipped in salt (a taste sensation) and asking yourself why you should bother.

A third tip-top crime novel would have finished me off at this point, so I read Tracy Kidder's House, Tawni O'Dell's Sister Mine (risky move, almost bought more kit-kats) and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, after hearing a review on R4's A Good Read.  It's 1929 in Dandy Gilver's world now, so I thought I should know what happened.  I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did and also - cover of the month, hands down. 



And then all buoyed up with research and non-fiction and a book about Pennsylvania mining communities that there was no point getting jealous about, I finally went back to a book I started last August staying overnight in the writer's suite at the home of McKenna and Brenda Jordan of Murder by the Book in Houston: Denise Mina's Garnethill.  It was hard work not to steal it to finish on the plane.  Well, I finished it yesterday and it's fabulous.  Just delightful. The best fictional family I've read about for as long as I can remember.  And the best fictional best friend ever.  How can I not have read this trilogy before?

And yet, I'm not sure it's book of the month.  It's definitely novel of the month, but I think book of the month might be

even though Shug looks scarily like Vic Reeves with the new hair-do.  This book's running at 3/3 so far: the roasted beetroot soup with horseradish cream was scrumptious, the parsnip and ginger soup was incendiary, just the way we like it, and last night's sweet potato and peanut gratin was a revelation.  I was ready to love it anyway since it had three tablespoons of peanut butter "lightened" with half a pint of double cream and a slug of olive oil, but it was mermaidssingingly, garnethillishly. you'vegotmurderously great.

Hmm.  Quite a lot of food for a blog about reading. 
 .