Hangin' out with the squid this week - Calamari Crime, this year's Left Coast Crime conference kicks off this morning in Monterey, California. There will be about 800 people here - mystery authors and hundreds of their fans. These are people who read mysteries, lots of mysteries ofall types, and love to talk about them.
The book room (the dealers to us book addicts) was only open for five minutes before I had picked up two treasures: one non-fiction: The Fiction of Ruth Rendell: Ancient Tragedy and the Modern Family, by Barbara Fass Leavy, who will be on a panel with me on Saturday to discuss the books we read and why we read them; and John Dickson Carr's long out of print second novel, The Lost Gallows, a 1931 classic which I haven't read in several decades, featuring his first series detective, Bencolin. I snatched that one off the table of one of the used book dealers here, shouting "MINE! MINE!" and nobody thought I was at all strange...
If you've never been to a mystery conference and love to read mysteries of any kind and talk about them, you are missing a chance to have a wonderful time. Keep that in mind, particularly for Bouchercon, in November this year. I'd love to see you there.
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