on Sara Paretsky's blog

  People who'd attended previous Bouchercons noticed various innovations this year. One was the continuous conversation - seventy or so authors in groups of three sitting in a side room swapping anecdotes and opinions. I went to listen to my new friend Reggie Nadelson (author of the new York based 'Artie Cohen' mysteries) and then on the following day to Sophie Hannah (recommended by Nicci Gerrard) and Ruth Dudley Edwards who writes frivolous crime fiction (most recently Murdering Americans) and really important and serious non fiction (notably on the Omagh bombings). There weren't many listeners to the conversations, usually a dozen or so, and this was a pity because what was being said was frequently funnier and more perceptive than the comments at the panel events. Organisers of the future, please note.

Another innovation were the 'hot ticket' seminars organised by the Mystery Writers of America. Ten major league writers, ten tickets for each event - to be won by writing a brief essay -- 'Why I would like to meet Sara Paretsky' f'r instance -- or simply being picked out a hat. I wrote an essay and got lucky - and here's the proof, a photo on Paretsky's blog. It was charming when she whipped out her digi camera and organsied the happy snaps, charming and consummately professional as she introduced subjects of conversation, explained sporting naunces to the lone Britisher (me) and generally drew the ten lucky attendees out of our star struck shynesses. It was a breakfast event with bagels and coffee and the only thing that stood in the way of complete enjoyment was the griping realistaion that this was yet another way that a writer was being kept from writing. Or at least from lying snoozzily in bed letting the ideas from last night's subconscious drift up into the area of creative possibility, like bubbles in a lava lamp..

A new friend - and lots more books

There was a moment towards the end of our Bouchercon panel 'The Mystery of a Lifetime' when a benign looking gent stood up to ask a question and Jeff Marks, chairing the panel, muttered apprehensively "That's Douglas Greene, he knows everything!" And so indeed it was. As a history professor and eminent mystery buff Greene does indeed possess an awe-inspiring range of knowledge but he had not risen to reduce us to intellectual dust and ashes, merely to speak sympathetically of the difficulties of writing about clandestine relationships when Other Parties were still alive. Greene is the biographer of John Dickson Carr who enjoyed relationships with women other than his wife. Our talk turned naturally to Pip Youngman Carter... and then on to the difficulties and challenges of small press publishing. Doug Greene is a partner in family-run Crippen and Landru and should therefore be an example to us all. He published Margery Allingham's The Darings of the Red Rose as about their 4th title in 1995 and now has a list of over 90 books - a treasury of hard-to-find short stories and radio plays. Golden Duck's going to have to go a bit to match that ...

Those Mean Streets

My trip to the 2009 Bouchercon in Indianapolis was a big event for me. I'd never been to the US before or attended this famous mystery-writers convention. I was eager to discover more about the city and its appropriateness as a setting for crime novels. But where did my investigations lead? To Frome in Somerset - now read on ...

She asked, wistfully

The most melancholy question I was asked at the Henley Literary Festival came from a dedicated fan ... 'while you were searching through Margery Allingham's papers, did you make any discoveries - a new Campion novel, perchance, a batch of unpublished short stories, even an unrecorded radio script ...?' Oh how I sympathised! But I had to say no. I tried to gain some credit for the discovery of The Darings of the Red Rose, a series of light weight tales written in imitation of some of Herbert and Em's 'Phinella Martin' stories published by Aunt Maud in Womans Weekly from 1917, but the questioner had already read them. The trouble with the Allinghams was, if a story was saleable, it got sold. Just imagine leaving it until 2004 before 'discovering' 70 writer's notebooks. Such is the unworldliness of the Christie estate (really??) I haven't yet read John Curran's analysis of Agatha Christie's secret notebooks but I feel sure it would be worth it - if I were a properly knowledgeable Christie fan. Am I? I have just read Elena Santangelo's analysis of Christie's short stories - all 160 of them. Loved Santangelo's title Dame Agatha's Shorts and agreed with her suggestion that removing the 'trees' of the novels allows light to fall on the flowers - the short stories. I think that's true of Allingham as well - when one is engrossed by the novels, the short stories may seem too insubstantial to satisfy. Read separately - and not gobbled - they are idiosyncratic, intriguing and a few very good indeed. I recommend a slow trip on the Allingham Minibus with plenty of stops to admire the view.

Update on Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 5:34PM by Golden Duck

And what an idiot I was - CHEAPJACK is the closest we'll get to an undiscovered -- or at least, unacknowledged Allingham. Her fingerprints are all over it!

The N word

A Family Sunday in the Park by Sara Paretsky is a short story published in a collection celebrating 20 years of Sisters in Crime. It's an account of V.I.Warshawsjki's first case and gets its impetus from a fictional family split within the Warshawski family at the time of the Chicago Race Riots. One household says 'nigger'; the other bans the word. No prizes for guessing where V.I. stands. The Chicago riots were part of the civil liberties movement of the 1960s. Language was political and highly charged and use of the N word is a simple shorthand for Paretsky to draw the lines of acceptability. It's a little more complex back in the 1930s. When thinking about Cheapjack as a 2010 re-publication I wondered whether we might need to do a Christie and knock out the word. But if we were worried about offending folk in Cheapjack almost all the book would have to go (especially the passages describing Welsh farmers). Napoleon Jackson, the 'tall African nigger' who Phil Allingham meets on a fairground in Mold is an impressive character making the most of his colour: "How is that I was born black and you were born white?" he asks rhetorically. But his rhetoric has nothing political about it - it's merely part of the warm up for a game of Chance - a game that he has rigged in a manner worthy of Derren Brown. (Read the book to discover this simple technique.)  His talkof colour, and social injustice and even religion is all part of his 'flash', his 'bit of moody'. Jackson takes to Allingham and proposes they team up for their mutual commerical benefit.  "You could say a lot of things about a darkie that I dare not say myself. We'd knock 'em all cold." Cheapjack makes its way though the world of Jews, gypsies, darkies, London Mobsters and fake orientalists - united by their common occupation as grafters. The outsiders in this story are the rest of us - the 'chumps'.