So, Friday. Did considerable hanging about, including breakfast with two of my favorite people, Drs. Bill and Virginia Edwards from San Francisco. (Bill's the model for the Chinese history prof in SHANGHAI MOON.) Other important stuff ensued, and then lunch with Jonathan Santlofer, down at the Arch, eating sandwiches and plotting and planning. New anthologies because we had so much fun doing DARK END OF THE STREET, and a teaching gig I'll announce soon. At 4pm, a killer panel, perpetrated by Val McDermid, with Val, me, Laura Lippman, Laurie King, and the heroic Joe Finder as moderator. Laurie stole Joe's beer and we all stole his lines. It was great.

Friday night, the Shamus awards dinner. Bob Randisi and Christine Matthews always find cool places for the Shamus, in every city Bouchercon ends up. In St. Louis it was the Annheiser-Busch brewery, where the food was good, the beer was free-flowing (and on offer were some brands AB owns but doesn't brew, notably Stella, so you didn't actually have to drink Budweiser) and we went on a brewery tour including the Clydedales. Only a couple of them; the rest were out on the farm. They're biiiiiig, by the way. But miraculous: not only did the stable not smell like horse poop, it didn't even smell like hay. I get the feeling other clean-cut boys and girls like the ones giving the tours and serving the beer precede the tours to the stables by like thirty seconds, to remove the olfactory horse evidence.

You'll be getting photos of all this, by the way, but trying to do that now would have just delayed these reports even more.