By Tracy Clark

Another conference down! Bouchercon 2024 is in the history books. For us writers, the premier world mystery conference is part class reunion, part fun work. It’s panels and meeting lovely readers; it’s signings and a lot of rush, rounded eventually in a non-permanent sleep, but before that, luckily, a relaxing beverage in a hotel bar or around a convivial dinner table with your buds, your peeps, the people who get you.

This year, Bouchercon was held in Nashville at a biosphere resort with actual streets and shadowy pathways inside. There were also atriums named charmingly Magnolia, Delta, Cascade. Plants and greenery topped it all off. For the directionally impaired, like me, all it took was one wrong turn, one unfocused moment, and we were somewhere we never intended to be.

How do I find my room in this city within a city, I asked the young woman at the front desk when I checked in. “Look for the red carpet,” she answered back, like that was all I needed to know. Whaaaa?

For four days I went round and round, round and round perpetually lost, passing my fellow crime writers, also lost, numerous times, each of us with befuddled looks on our faces. The Donner party had nothing on us. But Bouchercon is always fun, readers are always wonderful, and it’s always a pleasure to see talented friends again. A good lost time was had by all.

But the lazy river that ran through it, complete with its own boat dock, got me to thinking. I’m a crime writer after all. I cannot simply look at a serene body of water and not imagine a hundred different ways a body could be discovered there. The “river” was only three feet deep (I asked), but, hey, the truly committed could drown in a teacup.

Turns out, I wasn’t the only writer under the dome who looked at that river and had fashioned their own scenarios for murder. My people, my people. Gotta love ’em. This discovery of our mutual weirdness was made around a dinner table where we shared our methods of mayhem with that river as our body dump spot. The methods got quite creative. And why not? We are creative people who kill book people for a living. A knock on the back of the head and a dead fall into the shallow pool. A drunken stumble into the drink precipitated by a mickey slipped into a gin and tonic.

The methods grew more and more elaborate as the lazy river beckoned. Our waiter at the restaurant looked a little confused, and a little wary, but when we murder folk get going we kinda forget we’re in general population and that there are wide swatches of normal people who don’t contemplate fictional murder whenever they see a lazy river, or an empty field, or an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town.

It did a crime-writing body good to know that our kind of weird was a shared weird, that it was perfectly normal to envision a body floating face down in a hotel’s lazy river under sparkly lights accompanied by soothing music and a light show every night at 10 p.m. 

Garrote? I dunno. Seems like it would be too noisy. A knife to the back and a quick roll over into the water? Decent. Submerged? Weighted down by … what? Hmmm. Cement shoes? Too inconvenient. What murderer is going to come premeditated with cement? I finally decided simple was always better. Head hung over the side, held down by the killer until the victim drowned, then a quick flip in. No fuss, no muss. Cameras? I hear ya. There were cameras all over the place, but also a few blind spots as the boat passed under pedestrian bridges linking one atrium from another. The killer would have to be quick, the roll over well timed, but any killer truly committed to the enterprise could handle that in a heartbeat. Where there’s a will there’s a way, right? 

Bouchercon 2025 is in NOLA in a hotel right off Bourbon Street. C’mon. Some book killings almost write themselves. I’m thinking right off the beignets about voodoo, zombies and sharp knives. I’m thinking above-ground graves in creepy cemeteries, with a fresh body locked inside a crypt alongside the previous tenant still in residence. The mind reels. Somebody’ll likely have a more ingenious idea. My partners in crime always come through.

If you’re a writer, do you look at every place you go as a possible scene of a crime? If so, where’s the strangest place that sparked your imagination? A roller coaster car, mid-ride? A church? Your Aunt Louise’s 90^th birthday celebration aboard a gambling boat? 

I’m dying to hear.

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