Guest of Honor Lindsey Davis
Banquet Speaker Charlotte Hays
Bill Fitzhugh (his leg has healed nicely and he's coming this year!)
We heard from Bill recently and he gave us an update on his
projects. A company in
Berlin
has bought the rights to produce a radio series based on Pest Control.
Separately, they’re negotiating with another party who wants to option the
stage-musical rights for Pest Control for Broadway.
He’s finished The Adventures of Slim and Howdy which he thinks will be
published next spring by an imprint of Warner Books. This is a work of fiction
based on characters created by Kix Brooks, of Brooks and Dunn. They are in talks
to sell the film rights to the book. He’s also finished The Exterminators
(the sequel to Pest Control) and will shop that after the publication of
The Adventures of Slim and Howdy. Bill continues to write and produce a
weekly show on XM Satellite Radio’s Deep Tracks channel (Fitzhugh’s All Hand
Mixed Vinyl). The only other non-XM employees to produce shows on this channel
are Bob Dylan and Tom Petty.
Says Bill, “I’m riding my bike on a magnetic trainer these days, safely in front
of the television in my home. I should be alive come the fall.”
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Academia
(n.): a profession filled with bad food, knee-jerk liberalism, and murder...
Be
ing
a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Martha’s College in
Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone
busy, but Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination
of weddings, work,
and
spookery
deprives her of five of her closest
allies, she leaps at an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting
Professor on an American campus.
With her head full of romantic fantasies inspired by 1950s Hollywood, and
accompanied by Horace, her loquacious and disconcerting parrot, this
intellectually-rigorous right-winger sets off from England blissfully
unaware that academia in the United States is dominated by knee-jerk
liberalism, contempt for Western civilization, and the
institutionalisation of a form of insane political-correctness.
Will the bonne viveuse Baroness Troutbeck be able to cope with the culinary
and vinous desert that is New Paddington, Indiana? Can this insensitive and
tactless human battering-ram defeat the thought-police who run Freeman State
University like a gulag? Does she believe the late Provost was murdered? If
so, what should she do about it? And will she manage to persuade Robert
Amiss—who describes himself bitterly as Watson to her Holmes and Goodwin to
her Nero Wolfe—to abandon his honeymoon and fly to her side?