Mystery Writing and Popular Culture

Frankie here. My apologizes for the afternoon post. I'm in Boston attending the annual meeting of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Association. This morning I presented a paper (wearing my academic hat) on dress codes in schools. Yesterday (as a guest of the Mystery & Detective Fiction area), I joined three other members of Sisters in Crime on a mystery writers panel. The PCA-ACA conference moves around the country, and wherever it's held, the Mystery & Detective Fiction area (scholars who study the genre) invite in two or three panels of local authors to talk about writing. This year, my day job and my life as a mystery writer overlapped.

But being at the PCA-ACA meeting is always a pleasure. Aside from how much fun it is for a cultural criminologist to get to hang out with scholars from an array of disciplines, this is also a wonderful place for a mystery writer to be. Yes, I get to listen to scholars deliver terrific papers on the mystery genre and attend the panels of the local authors. But I also get to be a kid in a candy store dropping into panels in areas ranging from "A" (e.g., Academics & Collegiate Culture; Advertising; American Literature; Armed Conflict; and Arthurian Legends) to "M" (e.g., Men/Men's Studies; Musicals; Stage & Film; and Mythology in Contemporary Culture) to "W" (e.g., Westerns & the West; Women's Studies; and World's Fairs & Expositions). And there are all of the letters of the alphabet in between.

So please forgive my brief post today. But I'm out of this room and back out to see what else I can find to explore and who else I can find to talk to among the attendees.