• Shaking hands with author/filmmaker Nicholas Meyer at the close of a panel discussion about Sherlock Holmes continuation novels. I’ve read almost all of Meyer’s books, including the South American adventure Black Orchid (1977) and his coming-of-age yarn, Confessions of a Homing Pigeon (1981). However, it’s still 1974’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution that I cherish most, as one of the early stories resurrecting Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved London sleuth for the modern age. I am no less a fan of Meyer’s own 1976 cinematic adaptation of that novel, which cast Nicol Williamson as Holmes and Robert Duvall as Doctor John Watson—and which I saw originally thanks to a couple of movie tickets I won in a contest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to exchange more than a few words with Meyer at Bouchercon, as he was speeding off to a book signing.
• I had the opportunity to spend a bit more time with New York City author Mariah Fredericks. Although I didn’t read her earlier works, some of which
starred a crime-solving lady’s maid in Gilded Age Manhattan, I did very much enjoy The Lindbergh Nanny (2022), The Wharton Plot (2024), and her new The Girl in the Green Dress. She and I met at a party thrown by St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur. We talked briefly about the eccentric but thoroughly electrifying Zelda Fitzgerald and about the still-unsolved 1920 murder of bridge-playing playboy Joseph Elwell, on which the plot of Green Dress turns (and which is also to be the subject of the next book from historian Dean Jobb, of A Gentleman and a Thief fame). One thing Fredericks told me is that her next novel will not star a real-life historical figure called upon to serve in the role of amateur detective.• And I was overjoyed to get a book signed by Michael Connelly!
• I was also intrigued by Craig Johnson’s mention, during the closing ceremonies stage presentation, that his 22nd Sheriff Walt Longmire novel was inspired by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 philosophical yarn, The Brothers Karamazov, a work he was introduced to early in life. That forthcoming book is titled The Brothers McKay and will come out from Viking in late May of next year.
• During a Saturday-afternoon panel talk about future trends in crime fiction, bookseller, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler told his audience that Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field (1973) are the two books he wishes he’d never read, “because they have stuck with me for so long—in a frightening sense.”
• Seeing as how my to-be-read pile is already nearing skyscraper height, I curbed my acquisitive tendencies at this Bouchercon. I came back with only a small handful of books, among them copies of Mark Ellis’ new Death of an Officer (signed!); the 1960 Avon paperback edition of Death Has a Small Voice, by Richard and Frances Lockridge; and the first 1947 Dell paperback edition of Fools Die on Friday—Erle Stanley Garder’s 11th Donald Lam/Bertha Cool, published under his nom de plume “A.A. Fair.” My mention that this was the first version of that Dell release is important, because a second version exists, with a less racy cover illustration by the same artist, Robert Stanley. As the paperback history site Bookscans explains, “This is the only Dell cover illustration ever to be altered.” Apparently, there were complaints about the original art, so Stanley worked up a substitute, both featuring his wife, Rhoda. I previously owned only the second, less-provocative version of Fools Die; now I have both.
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