Alan Garner is, without doubt, one of the UK's greatest fantasy writers. I was privileged to grow up with his books, which aged in audience as I did, peaking for me with The Owl Service . Garner also visited my (and his) school, which the book is dedicated to, when I was 12, a really important moment in my young life. But I lost some enthusiasm with his adult titles, which were both difficult to follow and depressing. However, now well into his 80s, Garner has produced what is arguably his best yet. Although Treacle Walker is a very compact book in large print, it is so intensely written that it still has considerable heft - I've seen it described by someone as poetry, and although I wouldn't personally say that, like the best poetry it does pack a huge amount into relatively few words. The book's protagonist is a young boy, but this is not a children's book. The closest parallel I have is Ray Bradbury's wonderful  Something Wicked This Way Comes - the book cap...

For many years I've been fond of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown books. Brown is quite different in feel to his pre-war contemporaries such as those in works by Christie and Allingham. This mild-mannered, sleuthing Catholic priest relies on his experience of human nature, while justice weighs heavier than a strict interpretation of the law. But a TV adaptation has highlighted a strange anachronism that turns up surprisingly often in detective series. Since 2013, Father Brown has appeared in daytime TV programmes on the BBC, though the stories are largely detached from the originals, in part because the series was moved to a postwar Cotswolds village, and, as often is the case with TV versions of literary detectives, other regular characters were added to the cast. The move to a fixed village location is useful to establish those regular characters, but it throws up the worst version I've ever seen of an incoherent anachronistic setting. Period dramas like this - even cheapi...

As someone who writes the occasional murder mystery , I am entirely in awe of this book (which I received as a Christmas present). If I'm honest, I've tended to think of Agatha Christie as someone who turned out formulaic potboilers, partly, I suspect, because I've seen them on TV rather than read most of them. I was partly swayed from this view by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , but the 1942 Five Little Pigs  totally changed by view: it is a lesson in how to put a totally different twist on the detective story. On paper, it shouldn't work - because nothing much happens. The key events took place 16 years earlier. All Poirot is able to do is talk to a few people. There is hardly any narrative development. Yet it is a masterpiece of construction. Poirot's client's mother was convicted of killing the client's father all those years ago - he is asked to find out if it is true.  All the book consists of is an introduction, Poirot interviewing each of the five othe...