Bouchercon Day 3: McFetridge and Lansdale; Laukkanen, King, and Anonymous-9

AlbaMoretz Mayıs 31, 2022

After Bouchercon

From the perspective of 6:20 p.m., Saturday's 8 o'clock breakfast with the people who put together Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine seems a disorientingly distant memory, so it's time for a revitalizing nap before dinner. (This is Bouchercon; everybody takes naps at Bouchercon.)

Ah, that's better.

Saturday's panel on villains included this from Joe R. Lansdale:

"You're pulling something out of yourself. ... You're trying to bring humanity to the villain."

and

"You shouldn't try to write people as villains to begin with. You should write stories that unfold in a certain way."

And this from DBB friend John McFetridge, who said his villains:

"See themselves as breaking laws, but they see the laws as kind of temporary."

North flank of Empire State Plaza, whose conference
center is the home of Bouchercon 2013.

That was more than just a laugh line. McFetridge told of seeing university buildings named for Canadian brewers who made their money shipping beer into the United States during Prohibition, even altering the shapes of the bottles to make smuggling easier. The drug smugglers in his books, he said, fully expect one day to see the BC Bud School of Finance.

I bought novels by Owen Laukkanen and Anonymous-9 after hearing them read during Bouchercon's author's choice sessions, which concluded with Dana King's passionate and eloquent defense of Raymond Chandler's championing of conduct not merely heroic but honorable. King is a fine crime writer. He'd also make a good university lecturer, and I was proud to have had him as a member of my noir and hard-boiled panel earlier in the convention.