A look at one-half of the Bouchercon registration area one floor below
the lobby.

Candid shot of S.J. Rozen signing
books in the Dealers' Room.

Either Keith Snyder was attempting
to be witty on only a few hours' sleep,
or he had fallen asleep.

The "Show Biz Can Be Murder" panel Friday afternoon. Left to right: Shelley Freydont, Ron Goulart, Michael Bowen, Mary Saums, Keith Snyder.

"Oops I made a mistake" panel. Left to right: Jerrilyn K. Farmer, Jeff Abbott, Jan Burke, Harlan Coben and Peter Robinson.

Farmer and Abbott react to the
appearance of Farmer's fans.

Coben tells another smutty story
as Burke and Robinson look on in horror.

Friday

11:30 a.m. session: Oops I Made A Mistake

There are neighborhoods within a convention. The industry pros hang out in the bar and usually don't wear name tags. Some are authors in transit, heading off for a signing in the exhibit hall, or off to lunch to talk shop with the other writers. There are writers and their support groups, fans dedicated enough to wear T-shirts proclaiming their loyalty to Jerrilyn K. Farmer or Rita Mae Brown, and self-published authors attempting to raise their profile passing out postcards with their book covers on them.

White hair makes for a distinctive look, so maybe that's why Sue Grafton and Val McDermid seemed to be everywhere. The celebrity level seems low at a convention. Except for signings, Grafton didn't appear to be mobbed. Harlan Coben towered over nearly everyone, so he stood out like a beacon, a landmark to guide yourself ("To get to the exhibit hall, go down the escalator and turn right at Harlan.")

Otherwise, it all depends on who your favorite authors are. Where I would recognize John Gilstrap, Sujata Massey, Laura Lippmann, Peter Robinson, Keith Snyder (looking extremely dapper in a suit/vest combo and one earring, like a young Mafia consigilare who walks on the wild side) and Loren D. Estlemen (it's a mistake to assume that author and detective may be the same, but he has a presence about him that reminds me of a New York homicide detective I met. He, too, had that watchful patience of an experience hunter).

So many authors. So many good books. Not enough time to absorb them all. Six years of steady book reviewing have left me better informed about the genre, but my rattletrap mind has created huge gaps. There are authors whose books I know well, that are especially creative or about my favorite subjects, and authors whose books I read out of a sense of duty, and authors whose books passed by on their way to the library stack. There are great books that I simply could not find the time to read and review, and great books that I have read, whose authors I have forgotten. That can lead to some fraudulent conversations where I'm uncomfortably finessing questions like, "Have you read so-and-so?"

Fortunately, Ed Goldberg had the same problem with me. We met in the bar one afternoon, and while he knew my name, he couldn't place where, and while I met him at one of the previous Bouchercons, I couldn't remember a thing about him. Once that was out of the way, we sat and had a nice chat.

Bad transition here, but let me tell you a story I heard in the bar. If I tell it wrong, blame me. The guy was talking about a panel in which Parnell Hall said, "Everything I learned about Hollywood is rape and pillage."

Another panelist said, "No, no, Parnell. You got that backwards. It's pillage first, then rape. You get paid first, then rape. No 35-cent stamp ever survived being attached to a check. It never comes through the mail. That's why you have to go down and physically take it right out of their hands."

Parnell: "Now I know why I never made it in Hollywood. You make one little mistake, and it follows you for the rest of your life."

On to another day. While I went to three sessions, I'll report only on one. Fatigue and a night with too little sleep and a little too much to drink caused a headache that grew worse as the days went on. Perhaps the afternoon sessions were better than my scattered notes would indicate, but rather than try to piece together some fairly incoherent quotes and just make up the rest, I'd rather detail just one session and pass on to Saturday.

11:30 a.m. session: Oops, I made a mistake

Jerrilyn K. Farmer
Jan Burke
Harlan Coben
Peter Robinson
Jeff Abbott

Probably the primary rule for Bouchercons is that panels with certain people on them are going to be funny. The Agony panel on Saturday had a cast of all-stars, including Parnell Hall and Joan Hess. Harlen Coben is another writer who should make your must-see list, and the others who were on this panel contributed to make this one of the best panels I saw.

(Note: This is not meant to be an exact transcription. I guarantee that the session was far funnier than my summary. This would be a tape well worth buying, if you're interested at all in any of these authors.)

The laughter started early during the introductions, Jerrilyn Farmer's fans stood up and displayed specially made T-shirts that declared them members of "Jayfa's Traveling Varsity Mah-Jogg Team."

The panelists were asked about mistakes that cropped up in their books. Farmer offered one where a fan had informed her she spelled her lead character, Maddie, two different ways in her first book.

Jeff Abbott: "I haven't had a book out in over 5 years, so I just saved up my mistakes for this one." He then told a long story about his current book, in which he created a character who was a retired porn star named Velvet Mojo. "I had her act like a retired porn star, at least Harlan said she was." But the character wasn't really working, so "what I finally decided to do was give her an additional job." He made her a retired porn star/director. "She fancied herself as the Spielberg of porn. Then I made her a serious documentarian."

"My mistake was in thinking of her only as a stereotypical character." Once he started thinking of her as a real person, she became a much more vivid character.

Harlen Coben: "Having a fourth kid. Having a fourth kid is not good for the writing life.(laughter) In ‘Tell No One,' I said that Stanford White was a murderer, but he was murdered. Since it was written in the first person, I blamed Beth the narrator for that."

Another time, Coben wrote that Jack Klugman was in two episodes of the Twilight Zone. He received a book from a fan that showed he was in 4.

"But my worst mistake was in making Myron a martial arts expert." Which meant Coben had to go to dojos and read up on the subject. "So he stopped kind of training. He's more of a wimp now, like his creator."

Peter Robinson: "I always try to include a deliberate mistake into each book, to get people something to look for. People are so sparing in their praise, that the best you could get from them is ‘not bad.' One such former friend -- note the phrase, ‘former friend,' -- who I had given a copy of my book to. I asked how she liked the book, and she said, ‘well, it was all right, but you have someone driving the wrong way on a one-way street.'"

"Banks had to come from somewhere, so I made it Peterborough. I thought I was being clever. Little did I know I would have Banks explore something that happened in his childhood, so I ended up having to go to Peterborough."

Jan Burke: She talked about how one of her characters, as a child would listen to Latin Mass, and she would mishear the Latin phrase "kyrie elision" as something else (my notes are not clear on this, but it's the same as hearing the song "Gladly the Cross I Bear" as "Gladys, the Cross-eyed Bear." Burke said: "It turns out that ‘kyrie elision' was the only part of the entire Latin Mass that was in Greek."

"Another mistake was that my first big tax writeoff was for a visit to Gila Bend, Arizona, in July. Obviously, I am missing something."

Coben: "I'm from the ‘hum a few bars and fake it' school. One problem with research is that it takes you away from your writing. Don't use it as an excuse for not writing."

Coben said that, during the writing of "Deal Breaker" the topic of phone-sex lines came up, "So I felt it important (laughter) to you, (laughter) the reader, (laughter) that I look into this." First, he needed to get some phone numbers of sex lines, which meant a trip to the smut store. He asked his wife if she wanted to accompany him, and she said, "no friggin' way."

"And the worse thing is, that they won't give you a receipt for your taxes."

Abbott: For his novel about the retired porn star / director / documentarian, he had some questions about the porn business, so he was put in contact with a film maker. The man specialized in "regional porn," working out of Atlanta and he making films like "Confederate Cuties." Abbott sent him the scenes he wrote, and the guy came back and said things like, ‘No, no, no. You need three cameras here instead of one" and other expert advice on the cinematography.

Then Abbott asked how the films were financed and sold, and the guy said, ‘You'll have to talk to my mom about that, she's the one who handles the money.'

Abbott said, "Now, my mother has framed pictures of my covers on her walls, what does she have?"

Farmer mentioned that she came from a strong research background. She used to contribute questions to "Jeopardy," and knowing that you're questions are going to be immediately judged by millions of people encouraged her to do her best. Writing mysteries, she said, was much easier: you don't hear about your mistakes until about two years after you write the book, and by that time you don't care much anymore.

While "Jeopardy" is being filmed, the writers also serve as judges, because they know the material best. There was an incredibly easy question that said "Hula skirts are made of this" and the answer is grass. The woman chimed in and said, "What are tea leaves?" "So, we were asked for our opinion and we turned thumbs down on this. Now, the exact genus of grass on Maui is ‘ti,' pronounced ‘tea.' She came up to us and said that she had been a guest in Hawaii just a few weeks before, and learned to make grass skirts from ti leaves. So, naturally, when filming resumed, the host had to announce that ‘there's been an adjustment in scores.'"

The talk turned to copy editing mistakes, and Burke said that for one book, a copy editor told her she was using the word ‘ass' too many times, so she brought out the thesaurus, and inserted all the permutations she could find, including the words ‘double jugs.'

Coben: In England, one of his books was copyrighted under the name Ray Gordon. He didn't think much about it until he started getting e-mails that said, "You write erotic novels under another name." Coben said, "I told my publisher about it and threatened to take action if they didn't correct this, but my sales went up!"

Robinson: "Bollocks. Nice word. So why does my American copy editor always change it to 'ballocks?' One of my books was published in India, and the editor there changed ‘pubic hairs' to ‘public hairs.' "

Abbott told a story about another writer, who had written a scene in which a fat Southern sheriff was sitting down to his lunch and a Carta Blanca, which is a brand name for a beer. The copy editor came back with this notation: "I don't recognize what brand of mineral water he's drinking." "You can tell this copy editor has never traveled beyond Manhattan. Fat Southern sheriffs don't normally drink mineral water with their lunch."

He also told about a Czech translator who decided that the book's Americanisms needed footnotes, so you would read about someone eating an enchilada, and there would be an asterisk beside it, and at the bottom, it would be identified as "an Mexicano omletto." "I didn't realize that my characters are on an egg diet."