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IACW/AIEP has had many wonderful annual meetings in wonderful locations, but one of the most memorable is certainly going to be this summer’s visit to Zürich. Running concurrently with the Mordstage (“murder days”) festival of the Swiss crime writers and readers, the AIEP functions were organized by Jutta Motz, who made sure that everything ran like a Swiss watch. There were so many delights and highlights, it is hard to describe them all. The only negative that I heard from anyone was the ascent of the Swiss franc, which was, of course, beyond the control of our hosts.
The franc soared against the dollar and the euro, making everything expensive to outsiders, and it continues to soar as I write. Starbucks deluxe prices on café ordinaire were normal, and a $30 lunch or $50 bottle of wine began to seem like a bargain. Perhaps AIEP needs to look into taking over the world economy. Sure, we’re disorganized, but could we possibly do worse than the professionals?
Enh, money is just decorated paper. Our Swiss hosts made certain that we had no regrets for coming. Taking advantage of the clean and efficient mass transit system, early arrivers were offered a day trip to Lucerne where we toured some of the older parts of the city and a couple of the churches converted during the Reformation from their Roman Catholic builders, but fortunately, not destroyed. We then boarded a ship for a trip across Lake Lucerne. The ship, built just after the turn of the century, had been restored, and the engine—its red and shiny pistons and shafts open to view—was a marvel of cleanliness. Even the oil on it glistened clean and clear as baby oil.
We crossed the lake to a cog railway which climbs the severe slopes of the Rigi-Kulm. Rain and clouds had moved in, blocking most long range views, but as our lives passed before our eyes looking down the precipitous slopes, we were distracted from the feeling we were missing anything. Cabins with huge stacks of firewood against the winters and diffident cattle cling miraculously to the slopes, and at the top are hotels. We were surprised to see a huge construction crane up there, wondering how it could have gotten there.
Stopping for lunch, I fortified myself with a half bottle of wine, took a deep breath, and launched into the intimidating task of publically reading a chapter from Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad in which he describes his climbing of the Rigi by foot in the late 1870s. A trail up the mountain in honor of the great writer had just been designated.
Mary Tannert had dragooned me into doing this reading on short notice to avoid doing it herself (I’ll get you for this!), and I am embarrassed to admit I was not familiar with the book. I did not expect to meet up with Mark Twain on a Swiss mountain, but being in that location, reading this great writer out loud, so that the cleverness of his turns of phrase, the overall brilliance of his prose, could be fully savored, was for me one of the most moving experiences of my life. Whatever else America has done, we landed on the moon and gave the world Mark Twain.
The city of Zürich hosted AIEP at the city hall with a reception, and the mayor herself, Corine Mauch, gave us a whimsical history of crime in the city, including the story of a corrupt mayor of a few centuries ago. Concurrent with the Mordstage, AIEP members participated on panels at the University of Zürich and the Karl der Grosse Center with discussions on translation, e-books and their contract rights, television series in France, Greece and Switzerland, and crime writing in Eastern Europe.
A unique feature of the Mordstage was the Krimi-tram. Writers were given a podium in a streetcar to read crime stories as the audience was transported in a loop through the city. In the English Krimi-tram, Janet Laurence, Susan Moody, and Jerry Healy served up this moveable feast. In the German language tram, the readers were Marcus Richmann, Almuth Heuner, and Helmut Maier. A more stationary reading of fiction by Petra Ivanov, Tim Heald, Christoph Badetscher, and me was given at the headquarters of the Zürich police, an imposing pile with colorful murals by Auguste Giacometti. Filmed for Swiss television, the reading also featured an actress who read parts of the English language stories in German and was intended to draw attention to the anthology of crime stories edited by Paul Ott, Zürich: Ausfahrt Mord.
Paul Ott invited AIEP to visit his city Bern at the end of the conference and we were all given a walking tour of the city which is now the parliamentary capital of Switzerland and whose clock inspired Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as he rode the tram to work. The name Bern derives from “bears” (according to legend) and near what is left of the castle that once housed Bern’s last autocratic ruler (in the 13th century) is a bear park overlooked by a beer garden. Paul also hosted a nice gathering in his back yard with Swiss finger foods, wine and absinthe. I am confident someone who avoided the absinthe can more fully recount what a pleasant afternoon it was. (Like all things Swiss, lampshades are very well made and fit perfectly.)
Other delightful social events were the dinner at the old arsenal of Zürich (the Zeughauskellar), which offers a meter-long sausage meant to be shared by four people, and the farewell dinner held in the Restaurant Altes-Klösterli near the zoo. But perhaps the most interesting event Jutta arranged for us was awalking tour of Zurich led by Dr. Friedrich Senn, the director of the James Joyce Foundation. Dr. Senn is in his nineties and, according to Jutta, agreed to lead the tour only if he was alive to do so. This wry humor combined with his deep knowledge of James Joyce’s life in Zürich combined to make the climbs up the narrow streets to various locations in Zürich’s cultural history a highlight of the trip.
 We saw where Lenin and Goethe lived and the Cabaret Voltaire where Dada had its beginning. It was a brilliant presentation and Dr. Senn insisted his speaker’s fee go to the Foundation for student scholarships.
Somewhere in the midst of all of these activities, AIEP managed to hold its business meetings, hearing reports from each of the branches present, reviewing the procedures for the election of the next president, and setting our next two meetings for Toronto (June 1-3, 2012, concurrent with Bloody Words) and Oxford, England, (2013). The meeting in 2012 is a “congress” according to the AIEP constitution, which means that a presidential election will be held. I urge everyone who can to register for Bloody Words and participate. Registration is now open at www.bloodywords2012.com. The widest representation possible would be best.
One of the pleasures of all AIEP meetings is getting to know new friends and seeing old ones. For the first time, writers from Greece and Romania joined us. But a particular pleasure in Zürich was seeing our Japanese friends Ken and Harue Matsuzaka. Just before our meeting Japan was subjected to that horrific earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Fortunately, the Matsuzakas were unhurt, though Ken’s extensive collection of books collapsed in a massive heap. They had been planning to host a special meeting of AIEP in Japan in February, but the disaster made that impossible to plan. All of us were grateful for their coming to Zürich, but most of all we were grateful they were unhurt. |
