I had a lovely time.
Bouchercon, for those who haven’t heard of it, is the World Mystery Fan convention, the mystery fan’s equivalent of Worldcon. And this year, it happened to be in Austin. And L bought me a registration for a late birthday (or early Christmas—or both) present.
I got to meet a bunch of interesting fans. I got to visit with several old friends. I got to meet a slew of authors whose names I’ve known for a long time, and who, almost uniformly, turned out to be really nice people.
I showed up at the con hotel (the Renaissance Austin, an upscale chain owned by Marriott) on Wednesday night, before the con officially opened, and spent a little while hanging out in the bar with other early arrivals, mostly from out of town. I was pleasantly surprised when I found Registration opened at 7:00 PM, and I was able to pick up my registration packet, as almost the first non-committee member. After that, I went back up to the lobby (Registration, the dealers’ room, and many of the session rooms were on the “plaza” level, first below the lobby), and wandered around for a while, advertising by my con badge that Registration was open for early arrivals. (It worked; people saw me and headed off to Registration to pick up their own packets. Later the head of Registration told me she’d planned it that way.)
Duty done, I drifted from one group to another in the bar, listening to conversations and occasionally joining in. One such group ended in me going out to dinner (Cali-Mex at Manuel’s) with a fan couple from Tulsa, another couple from the suburbs of Toronto, a third couple from Chicago, someone else from Madison, and authors Stephen Booth and Danuta Reah, both visiting from England. I ended up sitting next to Stephen and advising him on what to order (fajitas) and how to assemble and eat it (in your hand; he used a fork and knife anyhow, fearing he’d dribble condiments or juice on himself). After dinner, I went downstairs and helped stuff the book bags that were part of the registration packet. As a reward I got to pick mine up early, as well as a second book bag assembled for those who’d volunteered. Between the two bags, I went away with three or four hardbacks, seven or eight trade paperbacks, and almost twenty mass-markets, all crime fiction and scattered across the spectrum from cozies to hard-boiled and noir, besides the bags themselves, which are very nice canvas holdalls.
Thursday I hit a couple of panels at the con, including “15 Minutes With Margaret Maron,” which featured several readings from her new Deborah Knott mystery and an explanation of how she’d found the carnie hook for the story, and “The Hardboiled Mystery and the Western Hero” with Bill Crider, Joe Lansdale, Elmer Kelton, and James Reasoner. Beyond that, I stayed around the Sisters in Crime hospitality suite (good for meeting old friends who’d moved away, or simply spun out of my current orbit), and hung out in the bar and the lobby and listened to some people I really enjoyed getting to know (Marianne MacDonald, Toni Kelner, and Barbara Franchi), and a couple who turned out to be jerks, in my estimation (G. M. Ford, for one). Toni, Barbara and I went to the “Death by Chocolate” feeding frenzy at ten, and later tried to make friends with a timid young raccoon that was nosing around the patio where we were sitting. (We never succeeded; the raccoon was more timid than it was hungry, and the chocolate wouldn’t have been good for it anyway.)
Friday I got to the panel on “Clues Make the Mystery,” with moderator Rhys Bowen, Rochelle Krich, Beth Saulnier, Dorothy Cannell, and Marianne Macdonald, and “Urban Commandos,” with moderator-by-default Laura Lippman, Jan Burke, Bob Armstrong, Loren Estleman, and Joseph Trigoboff. (I had a discussion the day before with Joseph in the bar that I feared would degenerate into political argument, which I detest, but we skirted it.) In the evening I went to the DorothyL listserv party and had the pleasure of meeting in real time a number of people whom I’d only known on the list before, including That Redhead From Menlo Park, Lauri Hart, who later shared another very good dinner at Manuel’s with me.
Later on that evening, I fulfilled the expectations of a couple of fans from Alabama (they were lots of fun to talk to, also), a professional counselor and a librarian who had been watching out for cowboys all weekend, and who told me I was the first one they’d seen. (I was wearing a Professional Texan outfit of Western shirt with a loud red yoke and cuffs with yellow piping and black body fabric printed with chiles, black jeans, black Western boots and an ancient, battered black cowboy hat left over from my teenage years in Comanche.) I ’splained that, in the words of the old bumper sticker, ‘I ain’t a cowboy, I just found the hat,’ but that didn’t seem to bother them. I looked like what they’d expected to see, so they were happy.
Saturday…well, it was just about the Day from Hell, at least early on. I answered phones at KUT’s fall fund drive, then broke off to go and proctor the Mensa Admission Test to a group of seventeen(!) candidates in conjunction with National Testing Day, while being beadily observed by two proctors-in-training (observing a proctor actually giving the test—twice—is part of the training-certification process). Once the test was done, I headed directly back to the con, thereby getting myself in trouble with T, who had been counting on me to bring the car home so L could ferry her to her homecoming dance. I wasn’t there because instead I was in the hotel bar, sharing a drink or three with Laura Lippman, and catching up on our respective lives. (Life has rather sucked in a big way for us both in the last couple of years, although hers is now markedly better. I only hope mine gets lots better soon, as well.) We agreed that divorces, even supposedly “civil” divorces, are scarifying for the parties involved, and I got up on my soapbox for a bit about “all this serial monogamy is a sad mistake.” (Brownie points to anyone who can identify whom I was misquoting.) Laura also gave me a copy of her latest Tess Monaghan mystery, The Last Place, inscribed “For Sam – An old friend, which is the best kind”. And she’s right. Thank you, Laura.
Saturday night I skipped the Anthony Awards Banquet (at fifty dollars a plate, it was a luxury I could forgo) and hung around in the bar some more (a lot of the most interesting mystery fans and authors are a bunch of lushes, let me assure you), and ended up going to dinner with Big Name Fans Andi Schechter and Kate Derie, and author David Cole, and having a conversation that ranged across writing mysteries, reading mysteries, con organizing, medical conditions (it was an odd feeling to be at a table where I was the relatively healthy one), fan and author personalities (a perennially interesting topic at cons), and a shitload of other stuff I can’t now remember.
I didn’t even try to go to the con’s final day today; after working an early-morning shift at KUT as phone-volunteer shift captain, I was ready to come home and nap—so I did. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to take Rhys Bowen and Meg Chittenden boot-shopping at Cavender’s, but we just couldn’t work out a time to fit it in to their schedules, which were as busy as authors always are at Bouchercon.
