Richard Bradford

If she didn't, by virtue of accident, someone found her before the barbiturates took effect, which is peculiar behavior, to say the least.

So you can see how certain aspects of herself migrated into some of the more peculiar fictions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not sure that this can be rationally explained.

she did generally speaking prefer animals to human beings but she had a particular affection for snails and when she was asked about this by her friends she explained and nobody really knows whether this is true but it sounded convincing to the person she was talking to she said that she first became interested in them because she watched two of them having sex and she was struck by

the fact that it was devoid completely of emotion, apparently.

And this seemed very agreeable to her.

Yes, she said... And thereafter, she kept what she called a colony of snails in her back garden.

Oh, yeah, well, she kept them in her handbag, I suppose to cause something of a stir.

I mean, when she was invited out, when she was living in England...

She went out to society dinner parties quite frequently, and she'd very often get drunk, but perhaps no drunker than anyone else there.

But a routine performance was that she'd get a snail or two out of her handbag and urge them to crawl across the table, well, the tablecloth, and see how the other diners responded.

And when she...

went to France, assuming that the customs might wonder why she was taking all of the snails over.

She hid about five of them in her bra.

Yeah, I think he's right there in the sense that there has always been an uneasy boundary between a sort of grudging respect for crime fiction.

It's accepted that some crime writers are good at what they do.

They're excellent stylists.

But because of the genre they've chosen, they can't be treated as proper writers.