I changed the subject, and told her I had been interested in the story she told me. I asked her if I could check the spelling of some of the names she had mentioned. Even then I was anticipating having to transcribe what she had said. I was guessing that the name of the older cop she had been partnered with was called Jexid or Jeskit, but she put me right on that: Jeksid. I mentally noted it, as I did the name Waller (my guess had been ‘Woller’) Alman. I like to get details right.

I made a mental note to pass on the correct spellings to Jo, if she was looking through crime reference books for these names.

We returned to the car. It was still freezing cold but now it was raining, a hard, clamant downpour, a roaring noise against the frozen ground, with flecks of ice or snow bouncing and shattering on the car’s shiny surfaces. Frejah rejoined the traffic, driving swiftly once more. The road was slippery in many places.

I could not help it: I was in fact brooding with irritation about Frejah’s ‘just crime fiction’ remark. It was like a casually delivered stab.

I know I am over-sensitive about this. Like all categories of fiction, crime is misunderstood and underrated by those who never read it. Within the reasonable limits of the genre it is possible to take on numerous subjects as well as the crime in question, and narrate them in different ways. There are many tones and moods and approaches possible within the genre, from the slight, repetitive and mechanically plotted, to the well imagined and technically accurate modern mystery, to the deeply researched, well thought out and psychologically plausible. There is almost no such thing as a generic or typical crime novel. Thrillers occupy a literary house with many different rooms.

Some of the crime writers I was acquainted with made a career out of the repeated activities of a single sleuth, who from one book to the next encountered and eventually solved one seemingly mysterious crime after another. I recognized the attraction of that kind of story, for the writer as well as the reader, but I had tried it in three of my early books until I realized I was becoming dissatisfied with it, and also bored. Since then my novels have been increasingly concerned with the psychological nature of crime, the criminal instinct and the buried motives of the criminal.