The dinners at crime festivals are a tricky affair. To rubber chicken, or not to rubber chicken, that is the question. I generally toss a coin in the air and let it decide, but in this case I’d promised the organizer Adrian Muller (married to my UK publisher, not coincidentally) that I would be around…

The past two days I have been in Bristol for the first annual Crime Fest, a festival that grew out of the visit of Left Coast Crime two years ago to the left coast of Britain. This is a small conference compared to BoucherCon (and you all have your registrations in for Baltimore this October,…

I have seen the future of travel, and it is…retail. I sit in the terminal at Newcastle upon Tyne, a shopping mall that happens to have airplanes around the edges.  I have been in two airports so far in the UK, Heathrow and now this, much smaller, one, and the difference between these UK…

In his introduction to one of the later short story collections, “Dr Watson” (ie, Arthur Conan Doyle) tells his readers that Sherlock Holmes has retired to Sussex, where he is keeping bees. The Sussex home is the setting for one of the stories narrated by Holmes himself, “The Lion’s Mane.” So when this compiler of…

A punt is a boat designed to take goods such as cabbages and chickens to market, pushed with long poles along the shallow bottoms. In the Oxford area, one punts from the end that is not built up, standing on the boards that line the bottom of the boat (which one can lift to bail…

 What I love about England, or travel in general, is the unexpected. Just when you think all the world is the same, everyone eats McDonald’s burgers and drinks Starbuck’s lattes, you find that McDonald’s sells beanburgers in rational countries and that Italy, the home of the espresso machine, regards lattes after breakfast as rather…