Portland, O' Portland.

 

The only Portland I’ve ever spent any time in is over 3000 miles from the Portland I’m headed to next Wednesday.  Though I can’t say I remember much about the former, as I last was in Maine fifty years ago, and no doubt whatever I do remember is long gone.  Not the memory, the places in the town.

The Maine Portland

Yes, I’m headed to Oregon for Left Coast Crime, a conference I love, and not just because it honored Lisa and me last year as nominees for Best Mystery in a Foreign Setting.  As an aside, when you’re nominated in the same category as Louise Penny (or William Kent Krueger) you soon learn to appreciate just the honor of the nomination. :)

Left Coast Crime simply is one of those gems of a conference that always seems to pick just the right place to be.  Last year it was in Monterey (honoring our Cara Black as a Guest of Honor) and next year it’s in Phoenix.  But this year, LCC is in Portland—the City of Roses—honoring our very own rose, Tim Hallinan, as its Guest of Honor.

Guest of Honor Tim Hallinan

Bottom line: how can you not love a conference that has such terrific taste in guests of honor?  By the way, each year’s LCC picks a catchy name for itself, and Portland’s is “Crimelandia.”  For the television savvy among you, no doubt you’ve picked up on the tie-in to the wildly successful TV series PORTLANDIA—though there’s also a sculpture of the same name in the city’s downtown. 

But yours truly is oblivious to such pop culture icons, and I’d missed the connection entirely until someone told me I should watch the show. Instead, I Googled it; little realizing how by doing so I’d come face to face with a déjà vu “Oh my God I’ve done it again” moment.

You see, twenty years or so ago, I represented a major Seattle-based corporation and was chatting with my good friend in its legal department about our respective children.  He said that one of his daughters had formed a band, released an album, and was hoping “something” would come of it.

That band turned out to be Sleater-Kinney, the all-woman rock band, praised as one of the essential rock bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Fast-forward a bit more than a dozen years.  I’m in Seattle doing my first book tour there, and who should show up but that same buddy.  He’d driven two hours just to surprise me.  He’d always been that sort of a nice guy.  We spent the time catching up (far more interesting than my book pitch) on how we’d both left the law (me for writing, he to be a restaurateur) and how our children were doing.  When I asked how his Sleater-Kinney daughter was, he said she was trying to do “something” for TV.

Yep, you guessed it: she created and stars in Portlandia.  If I should happen to bump into Ken on this trip, and he says his daughter is doing “something” for the UN, can world peace be far behind?

Let’s hope so, for with everything going on in the world these days, I can just hear our planet yelling, “Dig Me Out.” 

Pause for groaning to subside.

Yes, that was a pun tied into the title of Sleater-Kinney’s third album, a production ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

But then, they didn’t have to compete against Louise Penny. :) 

Hope to see many of you in Portland.  Oregon.

Jeff—Saturday