Boouchercon 22; The Locked Room Mystery

The start

The biz and the buzz

The Venue (very early morning)

Bouchercon was rather fantastic. It was hard work and could be a little overwhelming at times, with our new post pandemic psyche.

                                                 

Here’s a picture of my bag/book swag. I got these all given to me by the authors or they were in my bag. I even got a Jeff Siger book… whoever he is. I guess he’s a new author on the block. Is there another one? Can there be two? Is there a Jeff M Siger or something? Are they related? Does the other one have better jokes?

                                                          

And here’s a wee pic from the Strand magazine. Look who’s on top! It says in no particular order but number one is number one. 

                                                              

Meanwhile, I was sitting at number twenty six on the kindle chart.

                                         

And so to panels. David Magayna, who is now known as ‘Dave The Man’, was moderating his first Bouchercon panel. He was very well prepared and did an excellent job. His room was dark and rather cold. The panel was about the hero of the story being a villain.

The stress about panels is always the panellists. They are not in your control and can say, and do, anything. I didn’t think Dave The Man got an easy ride with his; the one panel member I thought was a bit ‘off’ was the one he knew best! But then, somebody thought that I was related to Stan because we are so mean to each other-  that’s a sense of humour issue. ( Like why I find no humour in ‘Friends ‘at all!)

Our Charity basket did best of all the baskets. Stan took Annamaria and I to ‘A shop that wasn’t Target’ to buy a nice wooden box for it to go in. It did look rather lovely.

                                            

Stan moderated a panel on data, or statistics, or venn diagrams or bubbles or drama quotients. Alan’s masters degree is in data management. He couldn’t follow it either. But sort of did, to a point. Stan, I’m glad to say did follow it.  The panel was on different viewpoints, I think he had lots of viewpoints on how to write a book.  One of  that panel seemed very out their comfort zone, which was a shame,  bringing home the fact that writing can be very solitary, and the switch to being public and engaging can't be easy.  Writing can be attractive for that reason alone i.e. being alone,  not everybody likes to be pushed in front of the ‘public.’  Two of Stan's panellists can called off so he asked me to step in, I think he wishd he hadn't!

                                          

                                         The panel in the big room.

                                           

                                                     Stan, were you thinking what I was thinking?

                                                               

                                            

This panel was about the weather. I thought it would be fabulous with one panellist born hot but living cold, one born and living cold,  one born hot and living cool then colder, one born cool then living hot, one born rainy living rainy, and one born very cold and living very cold.

                                       

It was a great panel but not the panel it was meant to be. It could have been fascinating….asking the hot guys how does that heat affect you. I think Stan had made a comment  in an earlier panel about the Crawdad people being lucky to survive being in Southern Africa. He knows about that. And hypothermia!

                                      

I moderated a panel on twists and turns….. more turns than a hotel door knob, more twists than Chubby Checker’s entire career. 

                                       

To avoid spoilers, and because I couldn’t pronounce one of the panellist’s names,  I  gave a wee blurb about the book and they had to identify their book. That went really well  except  I forgot one.  It was pointed out to me, and I pretended, badly, that this was just another twist!  To be fair, I had read her blurb out to her just before we pushed ‘live’ on the mic  so in my brain, I had turned over that page already.

                                       

Still, it got a laugh.

The locked room mystery? We were locked out our hotel room for nearly three hours. We’d had an invite for dinner and we’d been hoping to pop into Sujata’s  event at the Pimento.  The huge issue we had was making it understood that our stuff was in the room, behind the locked door. The new room was great but errrr we needed our stuff. They kept coming back with a key for a different  room.  We couldn’t go down to reception as it was full of Vikings, each wait there was over 30 mins to speak to the staff behind the desk – it was around the 4pm check-in time, so it was mobbed.

                                              

                                                           excited,  a salad sandwich.

And the mysterious ingredient in Stan’s soup? Well there are five ingredients in all…he volunteered potato. I guessed celery. You need to guess the rest as the song says.

                                                            

                                                                    This is what was in that soup face.

I think the soup deserves a blog all on its own!

 

Caro