A Malice Scrapbook

Celebrating Mystery’s Traditions

Malice Domestic celebrated its fifteenth year as the nation’s premier traditional mystery convention with a record attendance of over 800 members and guests at the Marriott Gateway in Crystal City, Va, May 2-4. Guest of Honor Barbara D’Amato, Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Barbara Mertz (a.k.a. Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels) and Toastmaster Parnell Hall mined the large vein of humor in today’s traditional mystery. Their brio provided a sovereign remedy to a cold spring and a tough act to follow for their Malice Domestic XVI successors, Dorothy Cannell, Marian Babson and Jan Burke, respectively.

Elaine Viets (author of the Dead-End Jobs and Francesca Vierling series) and conference Toastmaster Parnell Hall (author of the Puzzle Lady mysteries) get into their respective roles as villain and victim in the 2003 Malice Domestic Theater of the Air in Crystal City, Va., on May 2. This year’s conference saluted its “Ghost of Honor” Agatha Christie with an adaptation of her play Butter in a Lordly Dish. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
This year’s Malice Domestic presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Barbara Mertz, who writes mysteries as both Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters, as well as books on Egypt under her own name. Chatting with fans before being “interviewed” by Barbara Rosenblat, Mertz’s favorite audio book reader, Mertz little suspected the perils that lay before her. She should have; she presented a fair number of Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Awards herself. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition — er, the Comfy Chair — er, the lengths to which friends and Malice veterans would go. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
Malice Domestic XV Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Barbara Mertz shares an emotional “reunion” with Daniel Stashower in the role of the son she never gave up for adoption following the wild weekend of playing groupie she never had at Woodstock 1969. This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award came with a heavy price: a spoof of This Is Your Life starring some of the most irrepressible comics in traditional mystery. Mertz’s friends cooked up a scarlet past for the bestselling and award-winning author of the Amelia Peabody mysteries that featured, among others, Dorothy Cannell as an inadequately pensioned nanny reduced to selling flowers and suspicious vegetables, and Joan Hess as the college roommate from whom Mertz did not steal the text for her nonfiction book, Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Unlike some of the other players not used and cast aside by Mertz in her less than relentless pursuit of wealth and fame, Stashower’s abandoned love child came to a happy end. With the aid of a striped scarf and glasses, he turned himself into Harry Potter. (Photo by Greg Uchrin)
Malice Domestic XV Guest of Honor Barbara D’Amato (center) indulges in an assortment of white chocolate vegetables honoring her 1998 Agatha Award-winning short story, “Of Course You Know that Chocolate Is a Vegetable.” Her relationship with the pies served at the Malice Domestic Agatha Awards Banquet on the evening of May 3 proved to be somewhat more tempestuous, as Toastmaster Parnell Hall could attest. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
In keeping with the theme of Toastmaster Parnell Hall’s mysteries, puzzle maven and author (Art Quilts: Playing with a Full Deck) Verna Suit celebrated publication of her latest crossword in The Washington Post. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
Toastmaster Parnell Hall pays Guest of Honor Barbara D’Amato back in kind for the whipped cream pie she upended in his face at the end of Hall’s opening remarks to guests at the Awards Banquet. In preparing for his role as toastmaster, Hall decided it would be fun if his good friend D’Amato capped his banquet remarks by hitting him in the face with a pie. D’Amato, however, insisted that they share the prank as equal partners, both on the giving and the receiving ends. It distressed Hall that several members of the audience didn’t realize D’Amato helped to plan the gag. (Photo by Greg Uchrin)
Angela P. Wade models the winner in the Most Beautiful Hat Category of the 2003 Jacqueline Boroch Memorial Hat Contest. The contest honors late mystery fan Jacqueline Boroch who, for every Malice Domestic she attended, staunchly upheld the tradition of wearing a fitting chapeau to the convention’s closing event. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
Diane Finney models the winner in the Most Creative Hat Category in this year’s hat contest, held in Crystal City, Va., on May 4. Finney called her hat “The Intrepid Botanist’s Poisonous Pith Helmet.” The Jacqueline Boroch Memorial Hat Contest, held in conjunction with the Agatha Tea, has marked the gala conclusion of each Malice Domestic since 1999. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..