Should We Be Scared?

I can see this dependency on public transport is going to cost me money over the next six months. OK, it was only a pound today, and I have free bus-pass, so I I’m not complaining from a financial perspective.

It’s the TIME, or rather, the waste of it that does my head in.

Our local bus service out here in the sticks is pretty dire – one every two hours into the town. And when I say ‘town,’ it doesn’t have a resident horse and so even fails to meet the criteria for a ‘one horse town.’

All of which meant I was left kicking my heels for a while this wet and miserable morning. I’d just been to the dentist (oh, deep joy) and the only place I could think of taking shelter where I wouldn’t spend the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP on coffee and cake, was the local charity shop.

Obviously I headed straight for the book section. Faux porcelain cat ornaments don’t really do it for me.

See – I’ve resolved to start reading books other than Terry Pratchett novels, Jeremy Clarkson diaries and biographies / autobiographies of sportsmen and women or musicians / bands.

Now, having my target reads already predetermined, I’d never really paid much attention to the bookshelves in either retail or charity shops. Today I was bored though. Bored and with time to kill. And with a new genres to explore.

So I did. I paid attention – well I had a cursory look at least.

It’s not so easy to ascertain from this photo – I was getting some funny looks from staff as I tried to line it up – but I was amazed just how many books there were focusing around murder. Or crime in general.

I checked online – apparently one in every three new novels published in English is nowadays classified as ‘crime fiction.’ The genre was ranked second most profitable for Amazon in 2022, and presently the most popular genres in the UK are ‘Crime’ with a 38% market share, and ‘Thriller’ very close behind with 37%.

All of which means there are one heck of a lot of writers out there who know how to bump someone off, give them a damned good beating, or even just rob them

I take a modicum of comfort in that the protagonists are more often than not caught.

It’s not the fictional characters that worry me though. It’s the people who give them their status. They know a lot of stuff! Not nice stuff. How / why do their minds work that way?