Left Coast Crime 2026 Newsletter
June 5, 2025
This newsletter is going out to all registrants of Denver 2025 and San Francisco 2026. Denver registrants will remain on our newsletter list through the Lefty Nomination period in mid-January. (Not sure if you are registered for San Francisco? Check the San Francisco Attendee page for your name.)
We are thrilled to have greetings from our Special Guests to share with you.
ROBIN WHO?
by Robin Burcell
“…Let’s hope she doesn’t plan on hanging up her gun belt anytime soon…”
How many authors writing a mystery series with a female police officer as their protagonist would love to use that as a cover quote for one of their books? I certainly would. In fact, it came from an online review of my freshman mystery, Every Move She Makes (1999), starring Kate Gillespie, a homicide inspector for San Francisco PD.
Unfortunately, the quote wasn’t about Kate.
It was about me.
I was a fairly young cop back when I wrote that book, and it seems the reviewer believed I should stick to crime fighting, not crime writing. Ignoring the fact that the good reviews on this book outweighed the bad, there’s another reason this particular review sticks in my mind. Right around that same time, two SFPD cops came to my much smaller department to pick up a prisoner, and I asked them if they knew Holly Pera (first female homicide detective for SFPD, who was one of several SFPD cops who helped me with my research in the series). The two officers said they knew Holly, so I gave them a brand new paperback to give to her. Well, I didn’t hear anything for weeks, and figured that (like the one reviewer) if Holly had received the book, she must have hated it.
Cops can be notoriously critical of their fictional counterparts.
More time passed, and the book was nominated in the best paperback category for both an Anthony and a Barry award, taking away some of the sting of that review. I was actually working on the second in the series one night when my phone rang. It was Holly, thanking me for sending the book her way, and apologizing that she took so long getting back to me. The gist was that she’d only just received her copy, which was by now very dog-eared and battle-scarred. Apparently one of the prisoner transport cops started reading it the moment they left our department, and when he got done a few days later, his partner read it, and then it got passed around and around until it finally made its way up to homicide where some of those guys also read it, finally giving it to Holly on her return from vacation.
You’d think that since she (and the other officers) liked the book, it would be much easier to ignore the above mentioned review. You’d also be wrong.
I’ll bet most writers can quote one of their bad reviews word for word, like it’s tattooed on their hearts. It’s part of the highs and lows of being an author, and my career has certainly had its share of riding the roller coaster. That’s partly why I held onto that gun belt for so long—27 years—not because I believed the one reviewer who felt I shouldn’t be writing. Working my day job had more to do with the steady income needed to tide me over several periods of not having a book out.
Those sometimes long stretches had less to do with writing, and more to do with Life.
Briefly, between having twins, changing departments, losing agents, editors, and a tiny bout of a rare cancer that necessitated the removal of most of my left lung in 2017, there are some rather large holes in my writing career (and my chest, come to think of it). Add to that the pandemic which swept the country in 2020, I with my partial lung stayed far away from crowds, which meant no more LCCs for quite some time.
These gaps in my career and attendances at LCC are but one of the reasons I was so surprised when asked to be one of the guests-of-honor.
Would anyone even remember who I am?
I picture the conversation something like this:
“Hi. I’m Robin Burcell.”
“Robin who?”
“I’m one of the guests of honor for LCC 2026 along with Gary Phillips.”
“Him, I’ve heard of. Love his books. Have I read anything that you’ve written?”
“I don’t know.”
The person quickly searches the internet on his phone, finding my website. I can tell the moment he sees the photo of the young cop, because he looks at me, one eyebrow raising.
“Old picture,” I tell him. “Thirty years and thirty pounds ago.” (I like this catchphrase, because it quickly gets across the point that I’ve aged somewhat less gracefully than fine wine since that first book came out. And, yes, I really do need to get a new photo on there.)
“So what have you written?” he asks me.
“Besides the one romance? Four books in the San Francisco PD Kate Gillespie mystery series.”
“What’s that about?”
“First female homicide detective for SFPD.”
“Didn’t Laurie King write about that?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know that when I wrote mine. I also wrote five books in the Sydney Fitzpatrick FBI forensic artist series, along with The Last Good Place, a continuation of the series on which the ‘Streets of San Francisco’ TV show was based.”
He puts away his phone. “How many books altogether?”
“On my own, eleven, and another five I co-wrote with an author named Clive Cussler.”
“Oh. I only read mysteries. What’d you say your name was again?”
Sigh…
For the briefest of moments, I wonder if that gun belt still fits.
Imagining San Francisco
by Gary Phillips
I suppose like a number of mystery fans, I first got to know a little about San Francisco beyond the iconic Golden Gate Bridge through books, television, and film. I recall as a kid seeing a movie on TV called The Barbary Coast with Edward G. Robinson as the swaggering bad guy who runs a waterfront saloon during the gold rush years. I don’t remember details of the plot but according to Wikipedia, a young uncredited David Niven is a drunk sailor thrown out of the bar in one scene.
Then came for many of us the stories of Dashiell Hammett. Both his Continental Op and Sam Spade operated in San Francisco. The Op’s cases took him around and out of the city to other states, but the seminal The Maltese Falcon takes place smack dab in the city and its environs. Hammett’s descriptive passages about his city are not flowery. They are sharp and efficiently proscribed in the The Maltese Falcon.
“Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning.”
Then a little later, “Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and penetrant, blurred the street.”
A future (2021) San Francisco post World War Terminus was envisioned by Philip K. Dick in his 1968 sci-fi/mystery novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
“Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.”
Much has been made of the city as a character in mystery and crime fiction. I’m always discovering literary gems about an area in L.A. that has changed and continues to change as the demographics and physical landscape, affecting the denizens, also continues to change.
The same can be said of San Francisco – the city as crucible where all manner of characters are forged. In that regard, the novels of the late Bay Area writer Jim Nisbett come to mind. I had the pleasure of knowing Jim and highly recommend his off-beat, edgy tales.
Not the least of which was his first novel, appropriately a paperback original called The Gourmet (republished by Black Lizard as The Damned Don’t Die). Set in then ‘80s San Francisco, the novel featured a disgraced former cop turned seedy PI, Martin Windrow. “A Baffling Case Involving Murder and Kinky Sex,” the tagline on the cover advised.
Or take Jim’s Snitch World, a connective between the grifters in Hammett’s stories and PKD’s paranoid futurescape. As the publisher noted, “Snitch World takes place in a San Francisco of menacing technology, where the old cons come up short and the crimes of the gritty night have morphed into slick capers pulled off by the glow of a smartphone.”
“Klinger tried to think faster than an app called WhereIz. Does electricity flow faster through dendrites or copper? How about speedballed dendrites? You mean, like, cryogenic copper? Perhaps it’s at the metabolic level. Klinger did not permit himself to muse, that the vernacular breaks down.”
Pleased to be one of the guests of honor, I look forward to being back in San Francisco next year for Left Coast Crime.
Left Coast Crime 2026 Fan Guest of Honor
by Randal Brandt
I am honored to have been selected as the Fan Guest of Honor at Left Coast Crime 2026 in San Francisco. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and tell you a bit about the California Detective Fiction Collection at the Bancroft Library and my work supporting the crime fiction community.
I have been a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley for over 30 years. During that time I have held a variety of different positions at Berkeley, but the common theme among them has been California. I’ve worked with collections of early California maps, materials documenting the state’s Native American communities, and archives focused on California’s water supplies. Since 2001, I’ve been the Head of Cataloging at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley’s primary special collections library and one of the busiest and most heavily-used collections of manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials west of the Mississippi. Although Bancroft collects materials to support all aspects of instruction and research at UC Berkeley, the library’s strength is documenting the history of California and the West.
A history that includes the literature of California in all its forms.
The Bancroft Library, the core collection of which was acquired by the University of California from Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1905, has explicitly collected Bay Area mystery and detective fiction for many years. In 1998, the library acquired over 200 mystery novels set in San Francisco that had been collected by Don Herron (Don led the popular Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco from 1972-2022, among many other accomplishments).
When I began working at Bancroft, I brought with me an interest in crime fiction, and I would make periodic recommendations for additions to the collection, building on the foundation that was laid with Don’s collection. In 2013, the curator of Western Americana decided that we should be more intentional about collecting genre fiction and she asked me if I would be interested in serving as the curator of a mystery fiction collection. She asked me this question when we happened to get onto an elevator in the library at the same time. By the time the doors opened three floors down I had said “yes!” and the California Detective Fiction Collection was born.
The goal of the California Detective Fiction Collection is to broadly and systematically acquire examples of crime, mystery, and detective fiction set in California and/or written by California authors. Particular attention is given to authors who are icons of the mystery genre (including the “holy trinity” of American crime writers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald), members of the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, award winners (such as MWA Grand Master honorees Erle Stanley Gardner, Ross Macdonald, Margaret Millar, Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, Robert Crais, Walter Mosely, James Ellroy, and Laurie R. King), women writers, writers of color, and writers who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
In its relatively brief existence, the California Detective Fiction Collection has grown quickly. By library standards the budget for this collection is small, so a variety of methods have been necessary to build it: strategic purchases of antiquarian books, wider-scale purchases of contemporary works, and donations by authors and collectors. The donations have, in fact, been a magnificent component of the collection’s depth and richness.
Enhancing the California Detective Fiction Collection means that I get to support the mystery and crime fiction community as part of my day job. For many years I have had relationships with, and played roles within, various organizations and events such as Mystery Writers of America, Bouchercon, Litquake, the Bay Area Book Festival, and – of course – Left Coast Crime! I like to think that I have something to bring to the table (such as being a panel moderator), but this involvement also allows me opportunities to explain to writers, readers, and collectors about the role that the Bancroft Library plays in the community.
I have been passionate about crime fiction for decades, and I take great satisfaction (both personal and professional) in doing my part to ensure that mystery writing is represented in an academic research library setting and to otherwise support writers and amplify their voices.
LCC 2026 Toastmaster
by Leslie Karst
I think I’ve been preparing most of my life for this occasion — having the honor of being named toastmaster for Left Coast Crime 2026, San Francisco Schemin’. As a youngster, I’d sneak into the living room after everyone had retired to the dining room for the dinner parties my parents would host, where I’d drain what was left in their glasses. Those dregs of Old Fashioneds and Martinis may have been mostly water, but they clearly gave me a taste for cocktails in later life. (Some of you may remember that portable bar I brought to LCC 2022 in Albuquerque.)
So I feel supremely qualified to raise a glass next year to toast all that is our beloved Left Coast Crime. And I’m excited as all get-out that the convention will be held in our magical “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” (the moniker coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen back in the 1950s).
The first two LCCs were held in 1991 and 1992 in San Francisco, but the convention has not returned there since—until now, thirty-four years later. Which is supremely appropriate, given The City’s association with the mystery novel. Most crime fiction aficionados, walking down the streets of San Francisco of a foggy evening, would half expect to see a trench coat-clad Sam Spade lurking under a lamp post or Kate Martinelli hunkering down in her car on a stakeout. Or in my case, I’d be imagining Nick Charles taking Asta out for a late-night a stroll after his third Martini of the evening.
And LCC 2026 is shaping up to be a dream convention. We’ll be treated to Guests of Honor Robin Burcell (who knows more than a thing or two about the streets of San Francisco) and Gary Phillips (yes, we’ll be declaring a truce in the SF-LA rivalry and uniting in our love for the entire Golden State), as well as Fan Guest of Honor, Randal Brandt (librarian extraordinaire and curator of the marvelous California Detective Fiction Collection at UC Berkeley).
Not only that, but the convention hotel is almost directly across the street from the fabulous Ferry Building — home to numerous shops, restaurants featuring local and artisanal food and drink, and a vibrant farmers market — and is mere steps away from the famous Embarcadero, with its magnificent views of the San Francisco Bay.
My very first mystery convention as a newbie author was Left Coast Crime 2014, in Monterey, California, and I have to say the experience gave me an extremely high expectation for future conventions — and expectation that has been more than met each subsequent year at LCC. The event is so incredibly well run and organized (thanks to the amazing Lucinda Surber and Stan Ulrich and the local committees) and consistently features top notch panels, workshops, interviews, and other fun and exciting happenings.
Plus, this year it’s in San Francisco! Open up your Golden Gate and let the festivities begin!
More information about LCC 2026 & Online Registration
