A Malice eye view: a guest column by Alina Adams
Since I couldn’t attend Malice Domestic this year — one day, I shall — I asked my friend and author of MURDER ON ICE and ON THIN ICE Alina Adams to scope out the conference and report back. And so she has, as you’ll read below.
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(Malice) Virgin No More!
By
Alina Adams
Last year, I was a virgin (don’t let the breast-pump I had to shlepp with me to breast-feed my younger son, fool you).
This year, however, I headed for my second Malice Domestic convention a seasoned veteran, armed with the knowledge that while the
1) Banquet (held during Passover, so those who were observing could choose between a fruit plate and… no fruit plate)
2) And the closing reception (cake and pastries and ham and cheese sandwiches; still Passover)3) And the panels (mine was called The Others: Creating Compelling Secondary Characters; you can imagine what a boost it is to the ego to realize that not only is your Sunday at 9AM panel room the very last one down a long hallway, but that the sign outside merely reads The Others. It made one understand how the Professor and Mary Ann felt back when the theme song went, “The millionaire and his wife/The movie star/And the rest)
were terrific fun, the real action was in the eavesdropping.
So without further ado, the following is an apropos to nothing collection of items overheard and glimpsed while wandering the halls of Malice Domestic…
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Tim Meyers promoting his new candle-making mystery
series by dressing up in a Harry Potter-worthy cape and magician’s hat,
complete with a burning (electric) candle at the top…. Elaine Viets planning to research the next book in her Dead-End Jobs Mystery series by working for two weeks as a chambermaid at a Hilton…
Donna Andrews (“We’ll Always Have Parrots”), dressed in a rather
revealing corset to portray Irene Adler when interviewing the
character’s creator, Carole Nelson Douglas, in response to Carole’s modest, “People don’t seem to like mysteries with cats in them,” ad-libbed, “Well, they Otto!”…
Christine Goff (“Death Takes a Gander”) recalling that when she
began her Birdwatcher’s Mystery series an editor asked if the birds
could actually help solve the mystery. “What? Are we going to have them
pecking Morse code on the windows?”…
Guest of Honor Joan Hess being hypnotically regressed to past life experiences by interviewer Dorothy Cannell
and admitting that after she failed to sell over a dozen romance
novels, she decided to become a teacher of Gifted and Talented
children. Because in her school-district the G&T teachers traveled
from school to school, and she figured she could at least smoke in the
car…
Claudia Bishop (a.k.a. Mary Stanton of the Hemlock Falls
mysteries) was pressed into a bit of geisha service, when a gentleman
riding the hotel elevator with her suffered a back spasm and begged
Claudia to walk on his neck. Which she heroically did! (Claudia
revealed this tidbit during the marvelous Annual Berkley Prime Crime
author dinner, where wine was flowing freely, leading Edgar nominee Rhys Bowen
(“Evan’s Gate”) to confess that she once toiled as a script-writer on
“Sister, Sister,” “So I know every word Tia and Tamara Mowery ever
said!”
Oh, and some very lovely people won a few awards, too.