IN A CRIME NOVEL, a gathering in a large hotel can mean just three things: serial killers lurking in dark corners, wise-cracking hoods propping up the bar and, somewhere among the plush furnishings, a body waiting to be discovered.

So it is with trepidation that I, an editor more used to the gentility of the Edinburgh Book Festival, step into the lobby of the Sheraton Towers in Chicago at the start of the biggest festival of crime writing in the world.

Bouchercon (pronounced with a hard “ch”, after the critic Anthony Boucher) is an annual festival on a truly American scale: this year more than 1,500 people will attend, together with 400 writers and more than 100 publishers and agents.

Be in no doubt, crime pays. Even without Dan Brown, crime novels and thrillers make up by far the most lucrative part of a publisher’s output.With the possible exception of Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about the African detective Mma Precious Ramotswe, which in the US are published as “cosies”, we like our crime fiction red, raw and generally American. In a recent Sunday Times hardcover listing, Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs, at Nos 1 and 2, sold more than 32,000 books between them in a week.

My dilemma for the first morning is which discussion panel to attend. At 10.30am the group of authors discussing 21st Century Noir is the coolest, hippest choice; but surely Mad Hot Thriller Writers, starring the best-selling writer Lee Child, is more what I should be looking for. Though, wait a minute, wouldn’t Deadly Homes and Gardens, in which five crime writers discuss the decor of Sue Grafton’s apartment for Kinsey Millhone and Raymond Chandler’s Sternwood mansion be more fun?

Telling myself sternly that the new Dan Brown is unlikely to be an interior decorator, I listen to the upcoming writers Simon Kernick and Jason Starr debating the meaning and influences of “noir”. Defined by the author of Mystic River, Dennis Lehane, as “working-class tragedy”, “noir” is the genre many authors cut their teeth on.

Lehane’s interview is the highlight of the convention, the one that fans — and more than 500 of them crowd into the ballroom — have travelled thousands of miles to hear. Lehane obliges with a mixture of anecdotes about his huge Irish family, the difficulties of getting published when you are so poor that you can afford to eat only pot-noodles, and homilies to aspiring authors.

“Crime writers are the most supportive, friendly, welcoming writers in the world,” insists Lehane. And to judge by the crowds in the bar that evening, by the mix of fans taking photos of their favourite authors, the publishers buying wine and the authors swapping the latest forensic information, he is not wrong. There’s no hiding out in an authors’ yurt for these guys, no matter how famous they are.

The talking stops as we wait to hear who has won the biggest award. It’s Saturday night, and we’re at the banquet held on the 80th floor of one of the highest buildings in Chicago. Below us, a firework display is in progress, but we are more interested in who is going to win the Anthony Award for Novel of the Year.

Will it be the hugely popular Irish author Ken Bruen, whose The Dramatist has already won a Macavity award? Or Baltimore’s Laura Lippman, another writer heading for the top? In the event, William Kent Krueger’s Blood Hollow wins the supreme accolade. He is instantly surrounded by wellwishers. Like most other UK editors in the room, I am trying to identify his agent.

As the serious business of celebrating begins, and fans begin to tot up their collection of signed books, we agree it has been one hell of a good convention. Support for organised crime, I reflect, is very much on the rise in the city of Al Capone.

www.bouchercon.net

Selina Walker is the publishing director, Crime and Thrillers, Transworld.

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