I sometimes wonder if there is a pattern in my life. A slightly odd one...

I sometimes wonder if there is a pattern in my life. A slightly odd one.

On Saturday night I watch Crime Scene Investigation: New York, on Sunday night Waking the Dead – Part 1 (before that there was Garrow’s Law, Zen, and Sherlock), on Monday night Waking the Dead – Part 2, on Tuesday Crime Scene Investigation (the Las Vegas one), on Wednesday night NCIS Naval Criminal Investigations Service, on Thursday night a catch up on something like Morse or Lewis (preferably Lewis as I like the characters more in Lewis, they seem nicer people), and on Friday The Mentalist.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a morbid crime addicted weirdo who watches all the crime dramas on television. I read some of them and listen to them on the radio as well. Nevertheless, I am still not a morbid crime addicted weirdo.

I am a big fan of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon. This interest all started when I was younger and my sister had collections of Agatha Christie, Margery Alligham, Dorothy L Sayers, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I am not one of those people who try to work out the crime before the end of the book, I just enjoy the story that the author has created. Two of my favourite books are ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ and ‘The ABC Murders’ by Agatha Christie.

Over the last couple of years, I have taken to the stories of David Ashton and his wonderful Victorian creation, Inspector James McLevy of the Edinburgh Constabulary. If you are a fan of Victorian crime novels, and if you like Scottish based crime, why not combine the two and read a David Ashton novel. Start with “The Shadow of the Serpent”, it’s really very good.

Modern crime is fine, I would whole-heatedly recommend Iain Rankin and Val McDermid, but the classics of crime fiction still enthral and entertain. Anyway, enough of this rambling I am off to have some lunch. My wife has just prepared some mushrooms for me… at least I hope they are mushrooms…