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?

Soundtracks

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week I was re-watching the first season of Endeavor on Masterpiece Mystery, in anticipation of Season 2 beginning on Sunday night, and as I listened to the opening bars of Barrington Pheloung's gorgeous, evocative score, it occurred to me that I could not imagine Morse, Inspector Lewis, or Endeavor without that signature music. (If you are Masterpiece Mystery fans, you're hearing it in your head right now.)

And then I started to think about all the movies and television shows that are inseparable from their soundtracks. Just start with John Williams: Can you imagine Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Harry Potter (just to pick a few plums from the Williams catalog) without the music? What about Star Trek without Michael Giacchino's score? The X-Files without Mark Snow's eerie whistled opening?

I loved Gabriel Yared's score for The English Patient so much that I tried to learn to play the piano. (And inflicted the same on poor Gemma, who has, at least, had marginally better results.)

Or if you're old enough (and will admit to being old enough,) just think of Rawhide, or the Andy Griffith Show. (I dare you to get that one out of your head...)

As writers, we try to convey all the senses because those cues pull the reader into the story, but I think music is the hardest thing to describe in words. Most of the time we settle for trying to portray the feelings that music invokes, and perhaps we forget just how effectively music gives us mood and emotion.

So, REDS and readers, what springs to your minds when you think of movies or television shows that just wouldn't be the same without their theme music? (No musicals allowed! That's a different challenge altogether!)

(Oh, and by the way, isn't Shaun Evans, who plays the young Morse in Endeavor, fab???)

And just in case you've never heard the theme from Morse, here it is.

My Favorite Mystery Hunk

RHYS BOWEN:  We started this week with sex and we're going to end it with sex too. A veritable orgy!
As I mentioned on Monday I get loads of requests for "More Darcy, please." and my editor actually said once, when we were having a conference, "Do you think Darcy could take his shirt off occasionally?"
I have noticed with this series that my readership has broadened to include many young women, many romance readers so I'm conscious that I'm now writing for those readers as well as the die-hard mystery fans. Besides, as I've confessed before, I'm a sucker for a good romance.

So for our Saturday quiz today I thought I'd throw it open and ask : Who is your favorite mystery hunk? Or if you aren't exactly into hunks which male character in a mystery do you find most attractive?

LUCY BURDETTE: I don't care so much about looks, I like brooding loners who'll go way out on a limb for the underdog and downtrodden. Think Michael Connelly's Detective Bosch or Steve Hamilton's Alex McNight. I was also very, very fond of my own detective in the advice column mysteries, Jack Meigs.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Oh, hmm, I think I'm in trouble. My thoughts go immediately, not to mystery, but to cross genre books, mystery/fantasy/horror.  Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, Ben Aaronvitch's Peter Grant.  Maybe I need to broaden my mystery reading.

HANK PHILIPPI RYAN: Ah, I'm also not a hunk girl. The opposite, really. Morse, but you know that. And young Morse! I admit, like Roberta, to having a bit of a thing for my new character Jake Brogan (!)...but that makes sense, right? He's "my hero," right?  I loved Roderick Alleyn, and even Peter Wimsey.

JAN BROGAN - Jake Brogan?? Hmmm....he might be a relation.  I'm like Debs, I have not fallen for any mystery sleuths. In fact, I made the mistake of listening to a Det. Bosch mystery on audio and the narrator's voice irritated me so he is ruined for me forever.  I tend to go for alpha males, so I'm a Rhett Butler/ Augustus Macrae kind of girl.  I never trust new age sensitive guys.

 I'm still hanging on to my crush for Herman Melville, so in terms if fictional equivalents,  my hunk must be Ishmael.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Don't you mean, "Call my hunk Ishmael?"

Lucy and Hank, an editor once told me that in order to write a character that others will fall in love with, the author needs to be a little in love with him or her as well. So yes, I will also confess I have a bit of a thing for Russ Van Alstyne. I love the idea of the rugged northwoods guy who can fix up a house, cook a meal and take down a bad guy, so I crush hard on Alex McKnight, Cork O'Conner (in William Kent Kruger's wonderful series) and Joe Gunther (by New England's own Archer Mayer.)

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Oh thank goodness...I thought you meant mystery authors. Then I'd really be in trouble. I'm a Reacher girl. He comes in, kicks butt and then leaves.  Not a lot of talk and he won't want to move in. I like that.

JULIA: Oh, oh, yes. Seconding Reacher. He's so...competent. And he respects women as equals without even thinking about it. That's very sexy.

HANK: Reacher, Reacher. Yes, yes! Why is that, you know? It shouldn't be..

DEBS: I was going to say, I do have a bit of a thing about a certain Russ Van Alstyne, but I think he's taken...

HALLIE: Reacher's definitely a hunk, but usually if he falls for a woman, she gets killed. Like those extra officers on the bridge in a Star Trek -- you know they're not long for this world. Definitely Russ Van Alstyne. Robert Dugoni's David Sloane. Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko.

RHYS: I admit Reacher is a hunk, but not the kind of guy for me. I would have said I went for the brooding intellectual, like Morse, but both my heroes are wild Irishmen (can that be because I married a guy who is half Black Irish? Deep psychology here) I've always had a thing for Deb's Duncan. Just an all around nice guy.
So confession time now: who will win our Saturday hunk poll?