BoucherCon 2010 (2)
It takes a village to run a BoucherCon.
Rae Helmsworth, blessed be her name, asked me (back when BCon-San Francisco was but a twinkle in her mischief-filled eye) if I would consider being the US guest of honor. I had to think about it, for about a thousandth of a second, before I said yes. YES!
I’m a third generation native of the area, and a number of my books are set in and around San Francisco. So it seemed appropriate to do something to welcome 1500 people to “my” city. What about a tour of some kind, built around the books?
Out of such innocence was the LRK/SF tour born.
Fortunately, I have a personal assistant who is not only extremely clever and imaginative, but works for a pittance. (That she happens to be my daughter helps explain the latter.) She forced herself to re-read all the Martinellis, Locked Rooms, and Califia’s Daughters, then took a pair of electronic scissors to the books.
There are a lot of quotes. Those went to shape the Really Complete LRK Tour, here.
Recorded Books, who does the audio versions of all my novels, generously agreed to let us snip portions of their recordings for the voices of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, so I only had to read Kate Martinelli’s stories.
Cable Car Tours–
helped us pare the tour down to something in the neighborhood of two hours (sorry, those of you who were still out at the Cliff House at noon!) so that people could set off into one of those fabulous San Francisco autumnal days (photos by “Strawberry Curls”–can you guess which she is?) :
And sometime soon, we’ll have that recording on the web site, so you, too, can take a LRK tour of San Francisco.
(Although I can’t do anything about the company you’re in when you take it, or the weather outside your virtual tour bus…)
Will you also post a link to your conversation with Dana Stabenow? I so wish I could have made it up to SF to attend and see the two of you together!
Your books have give me hours of pleasure – thank you! And I have given “The Bee Keeper’s Apprentice” and a tin of tea to many friends for birthdays or as a token during sad times.
It was a great tour, and although we of the FOL’s were on the cable car that decided to break down, it was a great bunch with which to be stuck on an San Francisco hillside. And all we had to ask ourselves was “What would Russell do?” Unfortunately the answer was probably “fix the cable car or carry the operator back to the hotel on her back,” but we did the next best thing, cheerily waited for rescue…