A Bouchercon To-do List--G.M. Malliet

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Fans of G.M. Malliet's Father Max Tudor books can rejoice! There's a new Max Tudor book on the horizon, THE WASHING AWAY OF WRONGS, coming on Kindle in September and in paperback in January.

But first, there is Bouchercon, and

G.M. has some tips to get us ready:

Ah, Bouchercon! That annual mecca for mystery lovers is just around the corner, and this year it’s in San Diego. Writers, readers, and mystery fans: Are you ready? Here’s a partial to-do list:

 

The Swag Hunt

You’ll need to rustle up some irresistible giveaway items. Bookmarks? Pens? This year I have coffee coasters displaying the fabulous map drawn by Rhys Davies for my newest book, Max Tudor #8, now on preorder from Hachette / Little, Brown. It is called THE WASHING AWAY OF WRONGS. 

 

The title is taken from a Chinese handbook for coroners written by Song Ci in 1247.

 

I also have new business cards with the book’s jacket and my contact information. 

The fox features in the story and helps Max solve the crime. The QR code takes you to information about all my books.

 

The Grand Auction Offering

Sure, you could offer up a signed first edition or an exclusive sneak peek into your next thriller. Readers love that. But this year, I’ve offered to gift pages from a television script for the Morse series, given to me by none other than Colin Dexter years ago at the St. Hilda’s Mystery Conference in Oxford. This donation is to benefit local literacy charities , so be sure to bring money so you can bid high. Are you as sad as I am there will be no more Morse stories?

 

The Great Packing Dilemma

To pack the swimsuit or to not pack the swimsuit? That is the question. Remember, Bouchercon is in San Diego. Sunny beaches, lovely weather… But this is a writer’s convention with little downtime and lots of walking between sessions. So, swimsuit, maybe. And comfortable shoes, definitely. Something nice to wear for the awards dinner. But don’t forget the PI trench coat!

 

The Weather Watch

San Diego has surprised us all this year with a stormy plot twist. A tropical storm and, further north, an earthquake. I’ve been texting friends and relatives who say they escaped the flooding and they’re used to the earthquakes. But now the forecast for the conference beginning August 30 is for the usual sunny San Diego skies.

 

The Reunion

Reunions in crime novels are generally times for knives out and watching one’s back, but perhaps the most happy aspect of Bouchercon is reuniting with friends, some of whom you might not have seen since the pandemic. Will they recognize you without your Zoom background? I’ve been scheduling meet-ups and coffee / dinner / party dates for weeks. But I will keep an eye out for suspicious characters. It is, after all, a mystery convention.

 

So, as you prepare for Bouchercon, remember this: While the journey might be filled with its own set of challenges (Where did I put my tickets? My reading glasses? Did my iPad make it through the TSA scanner or did it end up in lost-and-found, as happened on my last flight?), the destination promises intrigue, fun, tons of new books, and perhaps… the inspiration for what to read or write next.

 

My panel is Saturday morning at 10:10. Please join me and Maddie Margarita, Linda Sands, Mark Stevens, Sara E. Johnson, and Sylissa Franklin as we discuss “Place as Character.”

Here's more on THE WASHING AWAY OF WRONGS:

Max Tudor thought he’d left the world of deceit when he resigned from MI5 to become an Anglican priest. Then his bishop asks him to return to his Oxford college, St Luke’s, to investigate the death of its chaplain, and Max realizes there’s no leaving the past behind.

At first, Max agrees with the official police verdict of death by natural causes. The Rev. Ace Graybill was as harmless a man as ever lived. It’s difficult to see how he managed to cross anyone capable of murder.

And the suspects are all above reproach: the celebrated Principal, the cautious bursar, the wise librarian, and a raft of benign students and academics.

But someone in the college wanted the kindly chaplain dead… and looks can be very deceiving.

Agatha Award-winning G.M. Malliet is the acclaimed author of three traditional mystery series and a standalone novel set in England. The first entry in the DCI St. Just series, Death of a Cozy Writer, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for many awards, including the Macavity and the Anthony.

DEBS: Who else is ready for Bouchercon?? I can't wait for the reunion part. So many friends I haven't seen in much too long!!

Remembering Colin

DEBORAH CROMBIE: This is not at all what I intended to write about today. But I've just heard that Colin Dexter has died and I can't NOT write about him. Or Inspector Morse. Endeavor Morse, as we find out at the very end of the series!

Colin was eighty-six, so it's not as if his death was unexpected, but still... For me, his loss is a passing of a part of my creative life--and the personal loss of a man I knew and liked. 

When I went to Oxford for the first time it was not long after the publication of the first Morse novel, LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK, in 1975, and I remember watching for street signs and looking at maps, imprinting the locations from the book. I'm sure I was influenced in my writing more than I realized by Dexter's Morse, the quintessential irascible detective, lover of opera, crosswords, good whisky, women, and wine. 

I know that when I wrote an academic mystery, I set it in Cambridge rather than my much-loved Oxford, because I didn't dare tread on Morse territory.

Colin (center) with John Thaw and Kevin Whately.

Colin Dexter was many things. A skilled novelist, a master plotter, a creator of characters that will long outlive him. But he was also a very kind man.

I met Colin for the first time in the mid-nineties, at a Mystery Weekend at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, where he was a keynote speaker. Some of you may know that Colin was very deaf (in fact, one of my favorite Morse novels is The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, about the murder of a deaf Oxford don) and that I also am completely deaf in one ear. That weekend, I was a newly minted novelist, but Colin and I formed a bond over our lack of hearing, and whenever I met him afterwards, he never failed to remember me. 

The last time I saw Colin was perhaps three or four years ago. I was waiting in the reception area of our mutual publisher in London, when who came in but Colin! He was alone, and seemed quite frail, and he was told rather brusquely by the receptionist  to take a seat and wait. When I went over to him and introduced myself, he lit up. He not only remembered me because I was deaf, but he knew my name and my books. I was so flattered, and touched. When we were both ushered up to the inner sanctum, I helped organize tea for him and we had a nice chat.

I'm so sorry that I did not meet him again. But Morse lives on, in print and on film, and if you watch very carefully, so does Colin, in his walk-on cameos in every episode of the series.

There will be many tributes, and recitations of Colin's honors, so well deserved. But, for now, I am going to go read a book, one set in Oxford, and remember the man I knew... 

Reds and readers, how will you remember Colin?

Marcia Talley--St. Hilda's Crime and Mystery Weekend

DEBORAH CROMBIE: St. Hilda's Crime and Mystery Weekend is the hidden gem of mystery conferences. If Marcia Talley weren't my friend, I'd be very tempted to commit some heinous crime born of jealousy, because she got to attend this year, and I, having been in England in May, couldn't manage another trip as soon as August. To make it up to me, Marcia is going to give us some highlights along with photos from this year and previous conferences.

(I am so cross. I found a fabulous photo the other day when was straightening my office. St. Hilda's, 1996, with Kate Charles and Marcia Talley being punted on the Cherwell by Laurie King. I meant to put it in this post but now can't find it. Apologies!!! But Marcia has plenty to share.)

MARCIA TALLEY: In the late summer of 1994, a new mystery conference made its quiet debut at St Hilda's College in Oxford, England. The brainchild of mystery author Kate Charles and the college's alumni officer, Eileen Roberts, the St. Hilda's Crime and Mystery Weekend has for over twenty years, drawn mystery lovers from all over the world to the tranquil banks of the River Cherwell.

The inaugural conference, “Queens of Crime,” focused on women mystery authors with Oxford connections, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, an entirely appropriate topic for St. Hilda's which was, until recently, the only remaining all women's college in England. Indeed, Val McDermid is an “old girl” of the college and Margaret York was its librarian and a speaker at first conference. At the end of that first weekend, response was so overwhelming that Charles and Roberts decided to continue the conference the following year with “The Golden Age, Then and Now.” Topics in subsequent years have included “Murder in Academia,” “Men and Women in Blue,” “Partners in Crime,” “ Scene of the Crime,” and “Mind Games, Psychology, Crime and Mystery,” to name but a few.  This year, as England commemorates the centennial of the beginning of World War I, St Hilda’s remembered, too, with “Crimes of the Past: War and Other Evils.”

It is this themed approach which sets St. Hilda's apart from other mystery conferences. There's none of the usual panels of writers sitting around making thinly disguised sales pitches for their books. Speakers come by invitation only and deliver thought-provoking papers on aspects of the mystery genre relevant to the topic that year. It is the skilled moderator/chair (Edward Marsden, Andrew Taylor, the late Robert Barnard and Natasha Cooper have been tapped for this several times) who ties the papers together and ably guides the question and answer session.

Papers are delivered in the acoustically perfect surroundings of the Jacqueline duPre Music Building, and there's no overlap between sessions so no one has to miss anything. It's this aspect of learning, I think, that keeps bringing people back to St. Hilda's: We hear Julia Wallace Martin talk about the relationship between manic depression and the creative process; Val McDermid's historical overview of gays and lesbians in crime fiction; or Alan Bradley’s poignant tale about the day his father ran away from home – for good. And who could resist a talk entitled “Lord Roberts Has a Full Crate of Whisky: Stories of the Anglo-Boer War” with which Frances Brody closed out this year’s session.

It's a tribute to the quality of the conference that authors who have attended St. Hilda's as participants continue to do so even if they haven't been invited to give a paper.

The conference opens Friday night with a champagne party on the college lawn which slopes gently down to the river. Just beyond are the playing fields of Magdalen College and beyond that, the towering spires of Oxford. Andrew Taylor marvels that there is no distinction between authors and non-authors at St. Hilda’s, none of the 'them and us' quality that distinguishes many conferences—fans on one side, and performing authors on the other. Perhaps because of its size—roughly 125 attendees —newcomers are made to feel welcome and find it a good place for conversation. Nowhere is this more evident than on Saturday night when attendees gather after dinner for a wine party in the Senior Common Room. Some have been known to stay up until the wee hours, chatting away about crime fiction or anything else that strikes their fancy.

Programs are punctuated by breaks for tea, coffee and cookies, and a civilized sherry hour invariably precedes the Saturday night dinner which has featured speakers like P.D. James, Colin Dexter, and Val McDermid. I'm still laughing over the evening Simon Brett performed all twelve roles for the world premier of Lines of Enquiry, a radio play “starring Osbert Mint, Betti Morns and Bren O'Smitt.” (You work it out!) I should mention that the food is excellent, served in the elegant, wood-paneled dining room and, as a vegetarian, I appreciate the tasty vegetarian options.

Everyone lodges at the college in clean comfortable rooms where “scouts” make up your bed each morning and electric kettles and the wherewithal for making tea sit on your desk.

The return rate is high. Anne Perry said it best: “The atmosphere is civilized, physically beautiful … a gathering of old friends to discuss the things we are all interested in. It is effortlessly 'academic', one leaves feeling entertained, enriched, educated, and renewed to begin again on the art and the career we all love.”

DEBS: Here are some of Marcia's photos, captioned as best I can (while I take a break to dig through more boxes looking for my own...)

The beautiful view of the River Cherwell from the college lawns.

Marcia, Alan Bradley, and Kate Charles, 2014

Kate Charles presides over dinner at the college high table, 2011

PD James chats with an attendee as a former college principle looks on, 2011

Kate Charles and Keith Miles, 2011

Val McDermid and Ayo Onatade share a joke, 2011

 Sigh. As you can see, the weather, the setting, the company, and the crime are divine. I'm setting my sights on next year.

One more snippet--Marcia has failed to mention that she has a brand new Hannah Ives novel, TOMORROW'S VENGANCE, so I'm going to do it for her.  I got to read it early, when I was in London, and it's wonderful.

Hannah Ives is introduced to Calvert Colony, a continuing care retirement community in Maryland, by her friend, Naddie Gray, and soon meets a colourful cast of characters: Colonel Greene, the spritely war veteran, Safa Abaza, an over-zealous religious convert, Ysabelle Milanesi, who fled the Nazis when she was a girl, handsome chef Raniero and his sister, Filomena.

When Hannah signs on as a volunteer in the Memory Unit, she becomes more even more involved in the lives of the Calvert Colony residents. But events take a dark turn when one of them is found murdered. Hannah is drawn into the investigation, and soon finds herself uncovering old crimes and reigniting quarrels that know no boundaries of place or time.

Publisher's Weekly says, "Talley deals sensitively with such aging issues as consensual sex among residents, vulnerability to scam artists, declining cognitive abilities, autocratic relatives, and the importance of touch and music in providing comfort."

Reading a Hannah novel is, as always, like spending time with one of your best friends, and getting a cracking good mystery to boot.

So who's up for Oxford and St. Hilda's next year?  I'm sure Marcia will be there.

It's a Crime--in Oxford

DEB: Want to know the best kept secret in the crime-writing conference world?

It's the St. Hilda's Crime and Mystery Conference. It's been held every August since 1994 in St. Hilda's College, Oxford--and that's England, not Mississippi.

There's no web page. St Hilda's doesn't advertise--it doesn't need to. Because those in the know come back every year if they can, and they tell their friends . . . and now I'm telling you.

Want to have a glorious English summer weekend taking in the dreaming spires of Oxford, staying in an Oxford college, mingling with brilliant writers and speakers? A drinks reception in the college senior common room? Champagne on the lawn overlooking the River Cherwell? And the punting--well, we'll get to that.

Writer Kate Charles gives us the scoop.

KATE: The first St Hilda’s conference was organized in 1994 by Eileen Roberts, then the Alumni Affairs Officer of the college, as an activity for the college’s graduates. Eileen was (is) a great lover of mysteries/crime fiction, and the possessor of a huge collection of books in her office. The number of times they were borrowed was a clue to her that many others shared her passion, and she decided that a weekend event featuring speakers about women crime writers with Oxford connections would be well attended.

It was! Speakers at that first conference included Lindsey Davis, Margaret Yorke (once the librarian of St. Hilda’s), Kate Charles, and Sarah Caudwell. At the end of that first conference, Kate conducted a survey to see whether people would be interested in coming back another year. The response was an overwhelming yes; Kate offered to help organize it, and she and Eileen have been doing it ever since. This year will be the 18th conference.

It differs from other conferences in having a more academic tone - speakers present papers rather than participate in panel discussions. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, as well as stimulating!

It’s also a themed conference. Each year a different theme is selected and addressed by speakers (mostly working writers, with a few academics added in) who are invited to focus on that particular theme. Themes have included historical mysteries, academic mysteries, the police (‘Men and Women in Blue’), and other such intriguing topics as ‘Strong Poison’, ‘All in the Family’, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, and ‘Behind the Mask’. This year’s theme is ‘The Anatomy of Justice’.

Last year the conference paid tribute to P.D. James during the week of her 90th birthday with a gala birthday lunch. Baroness James has been in attendance a number of times over the years, as has Oxford favourite Colin Dexter. There have been far too many excellent speakers to mention!

The Sunday morning punting competition has been a feature most years, ably organized by Gillian Linscott. The champagne reception on the lawn, held the first evening (on the lawn if the weather is fine!) is always memorable. Mystery Women host a reception after dinner on the Saturday night. There is always a well-equipped book room and a group signing.

At this conference, writers (speakers and others) and readers mingle without any distinction made between them. It has the atmosphere of a large country house party - very friendly, and in the most beautiful of settings, by the river, tucked away from the tourist-ridden centre of Oxford.

Speakers this year are: Natasha Cooper (Chair), Triona Adams (on Sarah Caudwell), Martin Edwards, Penelope Evans, Jane Finnis, Frances Fyfield, Ann Granger, Bernard Knight (Guest of Honour), Val McDermid, Edward Marston, Ayo Onatade, Cath Staincliffe, and Andrew Taylor. The programme will be released in the next few days.

DEB: Although I haven't made it to St. Hilda's nearly as often as I'd like, I have some precious memories. My first year was (I think!) 1995. I was invited as a speaker, and PD James was the guest of honor. This meant that at the Saturday night dinner (which that year was held at Somerville College) I got to sit at the high table with PD James in Dorothy Sayer's college. It seemed an unimaginable honor, then and now.

(In the photo of Baroness James speaking at last year's dinner in honor of her birthday, that's Andrew Taylor on the left and Peter Lovesey on the right. Lovely guys and two of my favorite writers. I'm so sorry I missed that one.)

And the punting? I'll never forget skimming along the Cherwell, propelled by Laurie King, a veritable Valkyrie at the pole. Here, Laurie elegantly punts Marcia Talley and Kate Charles.

If you think a weekend in Oxford with terrific crime writers might be your cup of tea, you can contact Eileen Roberts at

eileen.roberts@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk


And one more picture. Who is that impossibly young writer with the glamorous Kate Charles and Marcia Talley?