Laurie R. King

I am sitting in the lounge bar of the Stenness hotel on Orkney with a glass of the local brewery’s Red MacGregor (“An intensely hoppy, ruby red beer with a delicious delicate aroma and a rich, rewarding palate,” in case you wondered.) while the giant screen television is blaring on one side and three young…

If you want to get an idea of the effects of living on a small island, consider the techniques of car hire. The booking is done online, yes, but the owner of the business then meets one at the airport, and casually asks that when the car is returned, the customer just park it over…

Edinburgh is a city that requires the description “vital.” It is old but not dominated by age, beautiful but not limited by appearance. I imagine that it, like Seattle and San Francisco, are exciting places to live and work.  One of the interesting things about the downtown is that it has two levels. …

Posting has been spotty along with connections, first with a working class hotel conveniently near the library in Gateshead where I had an event, and then out in the moors, and finally in a nice well-connected Radisson hotel in Edinburgh where I had next to no time to write or post. And then to Orkney,…

A final note on Crime Fest: If you have the opportunity to see Simon Brett perform his one-man multiple-character play “Lines of Enquiry”, don’t pass it by. Forty minutes of silliness and high drama, performed in a variety of accents—oh, and it’s all in verse. His characters are played by Osbert Mint, Betti Morns, and…

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…