The nice thing about the World Mystery Convention - aka Bouchercon -- being held in Chicago is that it actually means major newspaper coverage. And the Sun-Times's roving publishing reporter, Mike Thomas (who filed many a dispatch when Book Expo was held in the city in 2004) highlights what will happen throughout the next four days:

When the globe's largest gathering of mystery buffs, authors, editors and fans convenes today in Chicago, there'll no doubt be talk of how the genre has exploded in popularity and gained literary respectability.

No longer literature's red-headed stepchild, it boasts such lauded talents as John Le Carre, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Dennis Lehane, among countless others who've made multimillions peddling their tortuous tales of intrigue.

The metamorphosis, though, has rendered a realm that once was vastly more cut-and-dried (think Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Parker) into one considerably more broad-based and, as a result, difficult to classify. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Pigeonholing has the potential to decrease book sales, and no one wants that.

"You have a lot of crossover in writers today," says Deen Kogan, a Philadelphia-based theatrical producer and organizer of this year's Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, running through Sunday and requiring a $175 registration fee. "You have people who wrote in romance that are writing in mystery. You also have a lot more tendency, I hope, to consider it not just detective fiction but mainstream writing. And you have a lot of very, very fine writers who write in that particular genre."

Of course, the not-so-gigantic irony is that all the books listed in the article are those that avid mystery readers actively stay away from in large droves, but to achieve bestsellerdom, you have to appeal to the masses, not the diehards. (Never mind that listing THE DA VINCI CODE as the kind of "historical mystery" that will appeal to those who dig that subgenre makes me snort up my current round of coffee.)