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  Earlier in the year a wonderful regional convention called Left Coast Crime (situated each year somewhere in the Western United States in February or March) was held in Tucson, Arizona. Sue Grafton was the guest of honor and Harlan Coben acted as toastmaster for the banquet. These smaller regional conventions (500–600 attendees) are more relaxed than a Bouchercon. The authors in attendance are not meeting with their agents, publishers, or publicists and so have more time to chat with the fans. Each convention has a book dealers room with lots and lots of new and used books for sale. If you plan on attending a convention, be prepared to exceed any mental budget you may set for book purchases.

  Another very popular mystery convention is Malice Domestic, which is held each year in Arlington, Virginia. The purpose of this convention is to celebrate the "traditional" mystery, sometimes referred to as the "cozy" mystery (containing little or no violence, profanity or sex).

  The guest of honor was the highly-entertaining Simon Brett and the toastmaster was Eileen Dryer. The fans who attended the convention voted on the Agatha Awards (see below).

  MYSTERY FAN AWARDS 2000

  The major fan awards in mystery fiction are the Anthony Awards, the Agatha Awards, the Macavity Awards, and the Barry Awards. Following are the awards that were won in the year 2000, for works published in 1999.

  ANTHONY AWARDS 2000

  Voted on by attendees of Bouchercon, 2000

  Best Novel: Peter Robinson, In a Dry Season

  Best First Novel: Donna Andrews, Murder With Peacocks

  Best Paperback Original: Laura Lippman, In Big Trouble

  Best Short Story: Margaret Chittenden, "Noir Life," EQMM 1/99

  Best Critical Nonfiction: Willetta Heising, Detecting Women, 3rd edition

  Best Series of the Century: Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot

  Best Writer of the Century: Agatha Christie

  Best Novel of the Century: Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

  AGATHA AWARDS 2000

  Voted on by attendees of the Malice Domestic XII Convention

  Best Novel: Earlene Fowler, Mariner's Compass

  Best First Novel: Donna Andrews, Murder with Peacocks.

  Best Nonfiction: Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

  Best Short Story: Nancy Pickard, "Out of Africa" in Mom, Apple Pie, and Murder

  MACAVITY AWARDS 2000

  Voted on by subscribers to Mystery Readers International Journal

  Best Novel: Sujata Massey, The Flower Master

  Best First Novel: Paula L. Woods, Inner City Blues

  Best Nonfiction: Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald

  Best Short Story: Kate Grilley, "Maubi and the Jumbies" in Murderous Intent, Fall 1999

  BARRY AWARDS 2000

  Voted on by subscribers of Deadly Pleasures magazine

  Best Novel: Peter Robinson, In A Dry Season

  Best First Novel: Donna Andrews, Murder With Peacocks

  Best British Crime Novel: Val McDermid, A Place Of Execution

  Best Paperback Original: Robin Burcell, Every Move She Makes

  MYSTERY MAGAZINES 2000

  One of the most popular ways mystery fans keep up with what is going on in the field is by subscribing to one or more mystery magazines. The most popular of the current fan magazines are:

  Drood Review, published bi-monthly for a yearly cost of $17.00. Articles and reviews in a newsletter format. 484 E. Carmel Dr., #378, Carmel, IN 46032 or order at www.droodreview.com.

  Mystery News, published bi-monthly for a yearly cost of $20.00. Newspaper format includes cover interview, columns, articles, many reviews and a listing of current and upcoming books. Black Raven Press, PMB 152, 262 Hawthorn Village Commons, Vernon Hills, IL 60061 or order at www.blackravenpress.com.

  Mystery Readers International Journal, published quarterly for a yearly cost of $24.00. Each issue treats a mystery theme. Calendar year 2001 will feature New England Mysteries, Partners in Crime, Oxford, and Cambridge. P.O. Box 8116, Berkeley, CA 94707 or order at www.mysteryreaders.org.

  Mystery Scene, published five times a year for a yearly cost of $32.00. Eighty-eight pages of articles and reviews. Heavy emphasis on author contributions. 3601 Skylark Lake SE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52403.

  Deadly Pleasures, published quarterly, for a yearly cost of $14.00. Eighty pages of articles, reviews, news, and regular columns, including the popular Reviewed to Death column. P.O. Box 969, Bountiful, UT 84011 or order at www.deadlypleasures.com.

  CHANGING OF THE MYSTERY GUARD 2000

  Each year the mystery fiction genre experiences a changing of the guard. Longtime mystery fans mourn the deaths of some of the old guard and celebrate the arrival of some very talented newcomers. The year 2000 saw the passing of Sarah Caudwell, Robert W. Campbell, Duncan Kyle, Lucille Fletcher, Elizabeth Lemarchand, Patricia Moyes, Roger Longrigg (known to most by one of his three pen names, Ivor Drummond, Frank Parrish, or Domini Taylor) and Miles Tripp. And it saw the first novels published by future stars Stephen Horn, Mo Hayter, David Liss, Scott Phillips, Bob Truluck, Sheldon Siegel, Qiu Xiaolong and Glynn Marsh Alam.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Spinning

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH has spent most of her professional life working in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. She has also done significant editing in those fields, most notably as the previous editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And then she became a crime-fiction writer. Like that. Suddenly, suspense stories bloomed from that contraption on her desk just as science fiction once had. And what stories they've been. Last year, under the name Kris Nelscott, she debuted her first crime series with the novel A Dangerous Road. We're pleased to present two of the several of her stories published this year. First, "Spinning," which appeared in the July issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and may be her best story yet.

  Spinning

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Midway through that first awful class— when the clock above the mirrors said she had only been on the stationary bike for twenty-two minutes, but her body told her she had been on it for 2.2 days, when she thought her heart was going to burst through her chest like a creature out of the movie Alien, when sweat poured off her in rivers, and her breath came in deep honking gasps— midway through all of that, Patricia bent her head, saw the flab on her thighs go up while her actual legs went down, and heard Tom, her instructor, call over the rock music:

  "Good. Real good. Excellent. Keep going. Wonderful. Hmmm. You'll get it. Relax. Wait until it feels good. Good. Relax.…"

  Something in the rhythm of his voice, in the involuntary nature of the sounds, told her he would sound like this in bed. He would talk, his words meaningless, an accompaniment to the beat his body had established, and the pattern would continue building, building, building, until his voice rose in a cry and everything stopped.

  She focused on that, held onto that, because it felt like the only thing that made him real somehow, made him, this Greek god of a man, whose muscles were perfectly sculpted, whose eyes were warm and brown and not quite sympathetic enough, slightly less intimidating. And she needed a reason not to be intimidated.

  Two hundred pounds did not fit on her delicate five-four frame. She didn't know how she had let herself go like this. Excuse after excuse, she supposed, a sense of denial, a willingness to believe, at first, that it was her clothes that were shrinking not her body that was expanding. It had taken two years of failed exercise attempts to bring her to this class, to this moment, and she had been planning to drop out of this one too until he fell into his unconscious personal rhythm and she realized that he too was human.

  And then she looked up, saw those not-quite-sympathetic eyes fall on her with something like disgust. She knew how she looked. The gym had thoughtfully provided a mirror in its exercise room. She saw the five other women in the spinning class: the darling with her tight, sculpted, twenty-five-year-old body who made it clear that she had never tried this before, and who wa
s so in shape that she managed all the motions with ease; the middle-aged housewives in the middle, looking fine to her, but complaining about that extra ten pounds they always put on in the holidays; the bartender, an older woman who looked strong and solid, who had told Patricia about the class; and the anorexic creature beside Patricia who was having just as much trouble keeping up— apparently her eating habits, like Patricia's, robbed her of the strength to exercise. But none of them looked as disgusting as she did in her sweats, her face red, her new perm damp, her body straining. Why was it that she, a woman who had to struggle to walk across the room, was being treated like the pariah, when she was the one who needed the most courage, the most strength, to be here?

  It was because the others were all afraid that some day, somehow, through the same careless inattentiveness that she had shown, they would all end up looking like her.

  But he, he had no right to look at her that way. He was supposed to be the professional, the one who helped people like her become hard bodies like him. He wasn't supposed to let her see that she disgusted him, even though she did.

  It was that look, in combination with her realization about him, that gave her the determination she had lacked. As her legs went round and round, the stationary bike's resistance on its lowest setting, she realized that she now had a goal.

  She had been pretty once, eighty pounds and fifteen years ago. She would be pretty again.

  And when she was, he would want her. She would take him to bed, and she would find out if he really sounded like that. And if he did, she would look at him with the same disgust she had seen in his eyes only moments before. She would look at him, and she would laugh.

  * * *

  Meeting her goal was harder than she thought it would be. After her first spinning class, she had to go immediately to bed, and when she got up the next morning, her legs ached so badly that she could barely climb stairs. Over time, she grew used to the class, and she moved onto weights, treadmills, and aerobics.

  Within six months, she had lost thirty pounds and her body had definition. The spinning classes were tedious— she had learned the pattern within a few days and knew what he would call out next— and she found herself waiting for a repetition of the moment, the moment that had inspired her. It didn't happen often, and she watched him now. He would catch himself, as if he did know how he sounded, and sometimes, he would catch her looking at him.

  She always smiled. She tried to be as congenial as she could.

  Fortunately, she didn't have to be congenial anywhere else. She was having trouble being pleasant. The exercise put her in a good mood for an hour or two afterward, but the exhaustion that came with it angered her. She went back to her family doctor, wondering if the exercise was hurting her (even though he claimed, up front, that it would be the best thing for her) and he had calmly, patiently explained how the human body worked.

  She got a sense that he gave this explanation a lot. You are carrying the weight of a 12-year-old girl in addition to your own body weight. It is as if you are doing these exercises for two, when everyone else in the room is doing them for one.

  She wished she could explain it to them. The looks had stopped, after her second month, except when newcomers entered the gym. Then they stared at her as if she were the freak, or the one that would fail, and eventually, they would disappear.

  She remained, tenacious to the last.

  * * *

  It was at her job, another twenty pounds later, that she realized she was in a revenge cycle. She worked as a Web-site designer for a local Internet provider. Her brother was her boss, and he would interview the customer on tape, and she would listen to the interview, use the material, and design the Web site from there.

  In the past two weeks, clients who came to the office (and there were so few of them: most of them as lonely as she was) began to compliment her on her looks. She did look better. The loss of fifty pounds had also taken ten years off her face. The exercise and all the water it forced her to drink had cleared up her skin, and the pretty girl she remembered was beginning to make appearances in her mirror.

  The office was a tiny place— a three-room suite with a door opening onto a strip-mall sidewalk— that became even tinier whenever someone new came inside. The wallpaper-thin walls did not shut out any sound, so she usually heard her brother's interviews with potential Web site clients twice. Those she didn't mind, because she made notes, hearing different things on the first and second listenings. It was the casual conversations, the folks who dropped in just to update their accounts or to gossip with her brother or to see, lately, how different Patricia was looking, that got on her nerves.

  She had taken to closing her presswood door and opening the window that overlooked the alley, no matter how cold it was. Sometimes, if she did that, she could focus on the whoosh of traffic on the highway, the crunch of wheels on the gravel, the occasional conversations of people entering other businesses. If she was really lucky, it all became white noise, a sort of background to the tap-tap-tap of her fingers on the keys, her mind not in Seavy Village, but inside the computer, in that vast and somewhat mysterious network of computers known as the Internet. There she could float, be someone else, anyone else, and no one seemed to care that she was different except herself.

  It was in one of those moments when, on a whim, she took the quiz the local psychiatrist had asked her to put on his Web site. His self-help book, Negative Thoughts and How to Cure Them, had been climbing the bestseller list, and he believed he needed a way for his fans to contact him. He thought the quiz was an open door. She hadn't been too sure, but then, she hadn't been too sure about his book either, which seemed to her (when she read it) a '90s ripoff of Napoleon Hill's classic Think and Grow Rich. But she, like the suckers she was designing the page for, took the quiz, and as she read the paragraph summary of her answers, she saw herself in its analysis:

  You have a tendency to blame others for your problems. Instead of solving those problems, you hope that others suffer worse than you have. Sometimes you fantasize about causing the suffering yourself. This is not healthy behavior. For a solution, see page sixty-two in my book…

  And because she had already committed herself that far, she looked up page sixty-two in the complementary copy of the book that the psychiatrist had given the office and saw the chapter heading in bold: The Revenge Cycle: Explanations of Your Obsession and How to Cure It.

  Surprisingly, the advice made sense to her. She had focused— obsessed— on Tom, on the sound of his voice, on the revenge she would get once she had sex with him and, more important, had laughed at him. Had humiliated him with her voice and her eyes and the body she had sculpted for just that purpose.

  After reading the chapter, she stood up behind her desk and ran her hands down her arms, feeling the skin beneath her cotton blouse. The skin and the muscle and the bone. She hadn't felt bone in years, the sharpness of her elbows, the two bumps on either side of her wrists. She was beginning to like this new self, beginning to accept that it, and not the woman whose thighs brushed together, was who she was.

  If she ended her focus on Tom, perhaps the exercise would end too. After all, the book said that all behaviors relating to the revenge cycle had to stop in order for it to be cured.

  The only behaviors she had were the good ones: the exercise, the healthy food, the grooming that she had only recently started to do again. Clothes looked good once more. Makeup made her seem older and more mysterious rather than a woman denying her encroaching middle age.

  As revenge fantasies went, this was a fairly harmless one. Perhaps she might dent Tom's rather solid self-esteem. Perhaps she might even make him reconsider casual affairs. But those two things might be good for him.

  They would certainly be good for her.

  It felt, when she looked on that moment later, as if for one brief afternoon she surfaced from her own thoughts, had a sense of clarity, and then dove back in, like a whale coming to the surface of water to take a breat
h.

  She didn't take another breath for a very long time.

  * * *

  At the end of eighteen months, she thought of spinning class as hell. But she hit her ideal weight that month, and actually came to the class in spandex that made her look athletic and not like she had squeezed her bulk into someone else's clothes. As she went through her first class at her perfect weight, she listened for the moment when Tom's voice rose, when it punctuated each word with a gasping sexual rhythm, and when it did, she looked at him and found him looking at her.