The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

The Nineteen-Nineties and Twenty-First Century
Bruce Taylor and Parnell Hall raised $1,700 for the Northwest Literacy Foundation
and a battered-women’s shelter.
In 1998 Left Coast Crime was at San Diego’s Bahia Hotel and Resort in the Mission
Bay area. Elizabeth George, the Southern Californian who writes about England,
was Guest of Honor, and local author Alan Russell was Toastmaster. A noted
San Diego book collector, Willis Herr, was posthumous Fan Guest of Honor. A Lifetime
Achievement Award went to another local, novelist-reviewer Robert Wade.
Left Coast Crime started at Albuquerque’s Hyatt Regency Friday, March 5, 1999,
but for me it started the night before when, reliving my Mystery Readers’ bashes in
the Bronx, I had a party for a dozen mystery fans at my home in Santa Fe, seventy
miles away. John Dunning was LCC Guest of Honor; Deborah Crombie, a Texan
who (like George) sets her mysteries in England, was Toastmaster; Tasha Mackler,
formerly a mystery bookstore owner in Albuquerque, was Fan Guest of Honor. Harlen
Campbell, who had recently published his first mystery, was chairman.
The theme of this LCC was “the literary mystery,” and Dunning tried to stick to
this topic in his Saturday night banquet speech. It proved unsatisfying since Dunning
couldn’t seem to decide whether the mystery should be “escape” or “great literature.”
The same indecisiveness was present in Campbell’s interview with him, in which he
opined that the mystery can be “literature,” but because it is essentially plot-driven
and has rules, it doesn‘t permit the freedom to explore character that mainstream
fiction does. The success of Dunning’s own Booked to Die (1992), a highly collectible
“hypermodern” book, was due to its combination of old-fashioned detective
story and book collecting lore, gathered by Dunning in the years he owned a Denver
bookstore.
Panels on publishing again proved popular as LCC invited a new group of hopeful
mystery writers. Increasingly, as lobby space at hotels seemed limited, the book room
was the place fans gathered to talk, a trend not unpopular with dealers.
In 2000, Left Coast Crime returned to Arizona, at Tucson’s Holiday Inn City
Center, and the weather in mid-March was hot. Sue Grafton, author of the popular
alphabet series, was Guest of Honor. Harlan Coben came from New Jersey to
be Toastmaster. George Easter, editor-publisher of Deadly Pleasures, was Fan Guest
of Honor. Maggie Mason organized “The Easter Egg Caper,” gathering egg-shaped
pantyhose containers and having George’s friends insert notes to him. In what was
proving a regular event, Mason’s team won the trivia contest, one patterned after the
TV show Jeopardy. She modestly claimed her success was due to naming her team
“The Golden Retrievers,” her favorite breed of dog.
More than a dozen fans had an enjoyable dinner at a local Cajun-Creole restaurant
owned by Elmore Leonard’s son Chris and his wife. A large committee made
this LCC a success, with Ellie Warder handling four different functions. The program
was varied, though Friday’s panels leaned in the direction of police procedure, with
two DNA Fingerprinting Workshops. Literacy continued as the charity of choice,
and there were both silent and live auctions to help Literacy Volunteers of Tucson.
Alaska in mid-February seemed a dubious attraction, but there was general
agreement that Left Coast Crime at the Anchorage Hilton in 2001 was a good convention.
Even the weather cooperated, with temperatures generally in the twenties.
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