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…

Sorry, the Tana French book is In the Woods, not Into. And good as it is, it didn’t keep me from sleep for long last night. I don’t do jet lag, but there’s no denying that when one spends a night on the plane and then has the better part of a day to get…

The British Airways plane to London seemed to be fighting for every inch of progress against a head wind that tossed and played with the big jet, so that sleeping in the First Class Pod (you always suspected that LRK was a pod person, didn’t you?) was a bit like sharing a bed with a…

I take off today for 21 days in England and Scotland, where I have eight signings, a three-day conference, and research at opposite ends of the country (the top and bottom ends, not side-to-side.) Because I had a whole lot of miles accumulated (I use my British Airways credit card to pay for absolutely everything)…

My son was home, a civilian, for Memorial Day for the first time in years. His hair is now long enough to stand up when he gets out of bed—or rather, out of sleeping bag—and he no longer has to struggle to keep from modifying every noun with “fuckin’.” The annual Corralitos Padres Pancake Breakfast…

Friday the wind shifted so San Jose on the other side of the hill got our smoke, which was both a relief (we could breathe, and we could see where the smoke was coming from) and a curse (we could see where the smoke was coming from.) The smoke was coming from about a mile…