In the first in a regular series of crime fiction round-ups, A.N. Wilson questions the motivations of today’s thriller writers

Try writing a crime story today and your potential publisher or agent will have one question in mind – will it translate to TV? They do not want the book to be enjoyed as a book. Many of the great “vintage” crime stories of yesteryear would not appeal to modern publishers – neither gritty American giants like Raymond Chandler nor witty Oxford dons like Michael Innes, where the pleasure is not the plot so much as the quality of the writing. I have enjoyed this batch, but few of them are well written. Some, indeed, are not “written” at all. They are really draft film “treatments”.