We talked for a while, the great Detective writer and I

about his work, the meaning of crime

in the fields of Oxfordshire

and the bounty involved with novel murder,

between the pages,

in one sentence, the last moment of a book’s life

should be that the suspect is named

with a gasp and then nothing

else to follow,

with perhaps the damning of yet another

advert or list of books that the voyeur,

the seer of slaughter and unlawful death,

must own, at least