GREY GOWRIE: I am here as a consumer, one whose claim is that I've spent a lot of money on all of you in the past and will, if I can, continue to do so. I've written down by way of introduction a few reasons why people do go out and spend on writing of this kind.

Crime writing is a structured form of literature-people can play around with the structure and the convention but they are there-and for people like me, with some training and background in poetry, that constitutes an enormous appeal.

Mary McCarthy once said to me, All fiction is really crime fiction; a whodunit. You look for the motivation of people to uncover what originally went wrong, what caused them to fall from innocence or made them tick-or you uncover how they overcame it. That is the fascination of fiction. If, like so many in the West, you were brought up in aJudeo-Christian background, you know that it is based on a crime story: a crime and a murder and an execution. Think of the role of the Iliad in our civiliza…