San Diego Is My Beat...

... for the next four days anyway. I'll be attending the 28th Annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) Convention. For you mystery folks, it's kind of like Bouchercon, for alt weekly nerds. While I am looking forward to mingling and boozing with my colleagues at other fine alt weeklies, I'm also going to try to venture out to La Jolla to visit Raymond Chandler's old place at 6005 Camino de la Costa. My goal: snap a camera phone image of the "far better home an out-of-work pulp writer has any right to expect." (That's Big Ray speaking.) We'll see.

Being a mystery geek (as well as an alt weekly nerd), I laid in copies of two Wade Miller novels featuring San Diego's top prviate eye, Max Thursday. I was lucky enough to score a Signet edition of Calamity Fair at Whodunit, and just today my copy of Murder Charge arrived in the mail. Also going with me on the plane: James M. Cain's The Moth (another beat-up Signet edition that I found for a song--$2.95) and The Butterfly, as well as Ross MacDonald's The Way Some People Die (a snazzy Pocket Books edition from 1967 that features a babe in a bikini drinking booze in a bathroom with a revolver on the tile floor--yeah, I know, weird). When in California, right?

What I won't be able to bring on the plane are all of the excellent Blog Project 2.0 stories I haven't had a chance to read yet. They're going to have to wait until Monday, unless I can sneak some Internet time at the convention...

But the stories I've read so far have blown me away. Especially Bill Crider's. I still can't get the image of "raining willie" out of my head...

Until then, hang high on the down low. I'll be back with AAN stories... maybe even a good Raymond Chandler tale... when I return in a few days.