I just go with the flow - the Constant Fox, the silly plots, the ever-present "cliffhanger" dramatic ending, the impossible village names, the out-of-breath policeman, the constantly changing sergeants, Joyce's crappy cooking and myriad hobbies - and, not least, Cully.

I caught the end of a Poirot episode yesterday, while practising the guitar, and grimaced at the awful and inevitable "dénouement", where Hercule gathers the assembled suspects together and, although he knows the culprit perfectly well, proceeds to semi-accuse each one in turn before revealing the real one. What a farce.

Raymond Chandler (educated at Dulwich College) had a few harsh words for Agatha Christie in his book of essays, "Down These Mean Streets", where he ridiculed the typically British genre and compared it unfavourably with the reality of nitty-gritty policing. Chandler's stuff, in its own way, is just as artificial. Both are bed-time reading on my Kindle.