kaaberbøl&friis

I just learned that a “Meet the Author’s” event is being planned for Agnete and myself in January when the UK version of The Boy in the Suitcase will launch. This caused no end of heart fluttering, maidenly blushes and 51-year-old exuberance here at the Little Water-Mill I Call Home. Let me see if I can explain why.
     Back in the 80′s when I was a little less 51-year-old and ebooks hadn’t been invented – forsooth, I jest not, the INTERNET had not even been invented – Foyles was the cathedral of my Charing Cross pilgrimage whenever I could sneak off to London. Though possibly that is entirely too lofty a metaphor to use about the sheer book greed that shone in my eyes from the moment I made my way up from the Underground at Tottenham Court Road. More pillage than pilgrimage, I think, as I zigged and zagged my way from bookstore to bookstore, little independents, the big Waterstones, and of course a delicious detour to The Forbidden Planet, which accounted for at lot of the overload on my returning flight. And finally: Foyles.

They still arranged the books by publisher then, making browsing a somewhat erratic experience. I had my favorite authors to keep up with, but I might have to look for them in three or four different places, which prolonged the hoping and the wishing: please, let there be a new one, or that unexpected ecstasy, an old one I hadn’t discovered yet.

They had natty tote bags with “Foyles” on them in which to drag home my haul, and I kept those bags for ages because the mere sight of them caused a flood of cherished memories and hot anticipation. Throughout my life, my relationship with books, and therefore with the people who feed my habit, has been an exceedingly emotional affair.

And now they tell me – or to be precise, they haven’t quite told me yet, I’ve seen it on the INTERNET – that we have an event there. Littl’ ole me and slightly younger and very much taller Agnete. Right there in Foyles, surrounded by people who love books as much as we do. Book Heaven is within reach.

Lene

This morning, I took the dogs for a walk. It was a hazy, Novembery sort of day, the field was sodden and the lawn clogged with dead, wet leaves. I’m only half way through the raking process. I’m no fanatic, but if I don’t make some sort of effort, whoever is down there pushing up the daisies – or in this case, mostly the snowdrops and the crocuses – is in for an uphill job. The dogs dashed about, dug a few holes, raised an indignant pheasant (when is a pheasant not indignant? When it’s dead, I suppose …) and finally chased a squirrel up a tree. It was a while before they decided “Breakfast” sounded almost as enticing as “Squirrel!” and a great deal more obtainable. I left them to dry out on the protectively blanketed “dog couch” and got down to some research. Interestingly, it turns out Dr Crippen made the same mistake that I heard about only last week from a Danish pathologist lecturing on (among other things) a fairly recent Danish murder: while it’s true that dry quick lime destroys a body, slaked lime actually preserves it, making the pathologists job a little easier. I then made myself a second cup of tea.

All of which is hardly interesting to anyone but me. And that is really the point – after some hectic months full of public appearances, book launches at home and abroad, and a certain amount of neurotic review- and chart-watching (see below), Real Life has finally reasserted itself. And I’m very glad to see it

Lene

Our tickets for British Airways had “World Traveller” stamped on them. How astute, we thought. They knew what kind of people they were dealing with – suave, cosmopolitan, well versed in the airways of the world. As it turned out, it simply meant Economy. The really suave cosmopolitans were in World Traveller Plus or in First – apparently no euphemisms needed in that category.

Well, little did they know. By now, we are so travel hardened that we hardly ever forget to put name tags on our luggage. We like to be on time, sure, but we do actually manage to snatch a few hours of sleep the night before departure and are rarely at the airport more than ninety minutes before the check-in opens. At the gate, we no longer join the first stampede to board, oh no, not us. We sit back casually, letting at least ten or fifteen less jaded passengers reach the desk ahead of us before we leap into frenzied action.

Agnete and I are both gifted with what we like to think of as a personal sense of direction. My North occacionally coincides with other people’s, but almost never with Agnete’s, with the result that whenever we get up to go somewhere, we set off in opposite directions, causing either a sort of muted body-to-body crash or  a momentary panic when we both realise that the other one has wandered off. When dealing with this, our body language differs. Agnete takes on a look of vague, gangly confusion, like a giraffe in slow motion. I, on the other hand, go into a rather desperate sort of orientation mode, up, down, side to side, in the head-popping way of a meerkat sentry. Between us, however, we usually do manage to cross the Kalahari of the airport terminal and make it to our seats on time. On our most recent trip, we only had to be rebooked twice.

They say travel expands the mind; it certainly expands the luggage. It’s a good thing I usually also manage to gain a little weight from all the restaurant food, making the time-honoured sit-on-it suitcase closing technique that much more effective. On this trip most of the expansion was caused by new books. This is not unusual, but the problem was unusually severe this time.Well, we were at Bouchercon. Would you send Imelda Marcos through ShoeMania and expect her to come out empty-handed? In the random pile in front of me right now, I can see Jade Lady Burning by Martin Limón, Eyes Closed by Gianrico Carofiglio, The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder by Mary Jane Maffini, The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotteril, Defending Jacob by William Landay, The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville, Death of the Mantis by Michael Stanley, Murder in the Marais by Cara Black, the Delta Blues anthology, A Lonely Death by Charles Todd and A Mortal Terror by James R. Benn. And not being able to keep my hands off the Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price table in Heathrow, I also ended up with Joanna Trollope’s Daughters-in-Law and Felix Francis’ first solo Gamble. On top of the pile are the two books I brought with me for the trip, Andrew Taylor’s The Anatomy of Ghosts, and Siri Hustvedt’s The  Summer Without Men, neither of which I finished. There’s also one bag I haven’t unpacked yet, plus everything Agnete brought, and the copy of Tina Fey’s Bossypants that has sadly been mislaid, probably in a black hole under a hotel bed in St Louis. Fortunately we can both quote several of the best and  giggliest bits from memory. In other words, there is quite enough to see me through the aircondition-induced head cold I also took home with me.

So excuse me while I go back to bed with the loot from my worldly travels. And yes, I have heard of e-books. They are a great way to ward off hernias and overweight penalties, and right now my Kindle, too, is bursting at the seams. Perhaps I’ll post you that list later. As you know by now, my sense of misdirection is defintely better than my sense of direction, and being lost in a good book beats the heck out of being lost just about anywhere else …

Lene

Writing as a team has its ups and downs. One of the ups is definitely going on tour together. While you may accquire new and fascinating insights into your creative partner’s dental hygiene habits, packing routines and snoring frequencies, waiting around in airports is a damn sight more interesting when you have someone to share your anxieties when you realise you’ve left the printed version of your e-ticket on your desk, and being singled out for a thorough frisking in the security line is just that much more fun when someone you know is laughing at you from the safe vantage point of the smoothing-ruffled-feathers-and-putting-on-shoes side of the counter.

We’ve just returned from Bouchercon in Saint Louis, and a brief New York pre-pub tour for The Boy in the Suitcase, which is being published in the US by Soho Press in November.  Much, much more about that later. For now, just a heartfelt thank you to everyone who made our very first Bouchercon such an addictive experience. It was a booklove fest, a meeting of bookaholic minds, a magical mystery tour, and a smörgåsbord of criminal delights. To anyone who has never been there – go next time. Those of you who’ve tried it before won’t need telling.