Drinking at Bouchercon 101

Look, mouthwash is made from alcohol. You can’t carry around a bottle of Listerine and swig a mouthful around whenever you start to feel like something crawled down your throat and died. Alcohol is your friend.

Although you don't have to tell Russel that. Making fashion statements like this by the end of the weekend, I think he's the one person alcohol might be the enemy of.



And no, this isn't a commentary on the only Scot who doesn't drink. He uses breath mints.

(Me and the fantastic, sensational, charming, sexually depraved Al Guthrie)

So, you drink alcohol. Consider it a sacrifice, a social nicety, a favour you’re doing for everyone else. And who's going to complain when Al's partner is doing the buying?


Because the truth is, by the second night you usually do feel as if something had crawled down your throat and died.

It’s like fitting all the socializing an author typically does in a year into a weekend, but I do have a few rules.

You never get drunk until the last night, if you’re going to. By then, everyone’s in the same boat, all the panelists are wearing dark glasses Sunday morning anyway (never mind the audience groaning over their coffee and grunting if anyone gets too close) and it doesn’t matter. But until then, you behave. Right Marcus?

Either that or you end up partially dressed and in cold water.

But if you’re me, you're a good little girl. ☺

Just don’t ask Jon Jordan about Wednesday and the beer and why I had my head in my hands by dinner time.

When I was at Harrogate, the song You’re Beautiful was the frame for my holiday. This time, it was drinking beer at the Jordan’s, who won the Anthony for best fan publication for Crimespree. A well-deserved honour for people who’ve given so much to the mystery community. In fact, Jon gave me some extra copies of the last issue to take with me and I ended up giving one to the woman I sat beside on my last flight last night. She read my article and actually looked through the whole magazine – her and I had a great talk. It was a fantastic ending to a wonderful trip, and I’ll probably touch more on it later this week, because it was a fluke. I was asked by the airline to move seats so that some people traveling together could sit together, and I was glad to find myself sitting next to a woman my age, named LARA (and damn, she says it the way my Lara says it in my book – rhymes with Sarah) and we talked about everything under the sun. And she doesn’t read crime fiction, but she is a high school science teacher and I told her about Rankin, Lippman, Billingham, etc. I’m a good evangelist for the genre. Felt a bit like the JW’s, pulling a magazine out of my bag and asking if she’d heard the Noir News.

Anyway, at this stage I really do have a million things going through my head, and so much I want to say, but it’s hard to break it down and make it cohesive.

So, I’ll just tell you that I kissed Lee Child.



And that he commented to me that I have a huge internet presence and that he’d now met the famous Sandra Ruttan.

Oh, and I’ll tell you that Ken Bruen has incredible hand strength. If he comes up to you and squeezes your shoulder, it’s better than a chiropractic treatment. You find yourself snapping your fingers saying A little lower Ken. That’s it. (Insert various moans of pleasure here.)




I have a lot of pictures to post this week.

Plus, I have the video.

The Truth About Dave White video.

But we’ll give him a few more days to get his affairs in order first.