The teller of tales.

As I chomp my way through Agatha Christie's works a few random thoughts about the development of the popular novel creep in. She sometimes reads like Enid Blyton for adults; sometimes she's a little more literary than that. My feeling is that they were both excellent tellers of tales and that is what a good entertainer should be. Modern fiction writers may be subtler, be better edited, more spohisticated, but they don't always have such intricate and interesting plots. They might be good at dialogue and creating believable characters and hot with the psychology, they aren't always page turners. In the crime genre there is too much reliance on the forensic details and the horrors of decomposition both physically and in the human psyche. The murderer is often not a person we have been at all interested in.

I admire people who can tell a good tale in an engaging way and I'm not too bothered if they are unsophisticated in their style. AC sticks very much to the plot, especially at the end when everything speeds up agreeably. There is very little superfluous waffle, though just enough to cause distraction. The clues are always there for the reader and the cast is all introduce properly so we can get to know them. There is no deus ex machina brought in on the last-but-one-page.

Who did I see being interviewed recently who said that on the last page he writes a 'confession' or a denouement that implicates the wrong person to punish the reader who cheats by looking at the end first?

I watched with enormous pleasure the BBC biopic on Barbara Cartland - missed it first time round. These larger-than-life celebrity figures that we love to mock always have an interesting history and it's often a heart-breaking one. Will I ever be thinking that about Posh though? Or was it the times they lived in?

Barbara was a shrewd operator and knowing director of her own drama so not so flighty and lacking in IQ as her books make her sound. Her tales did what she wanted - entertained bored housewives in their millions and continued the quest for the Holy Grail of perfect love and perfect happiness. It has been claimed that reading too many Mills and Boone can be detrimental to ones health - the disappointment of real life is too much to bear.

In my opinion most readers recognise the illusion for what it is but go along with the fantasy which gives them a respite from reality.

Which could lead me into a diatribe about children's writers who believe children need 'real life' situations to relate to so give them all the heavy stuff like pregnancy, dying parents, paedophilia and so on. What nonsense! They can get all that from their parent's newspapers.