of puzzle-solving. While they offered no scope for the imaginative identification I found in, say, the novels of Arthur Ransome, picturing myself as an Amazon in a red-knitted cap, I read whodunnits as if entranced. The racism and classism of Christie's fiction washed over me unnoticed. I read as if addicted, helpless before the urge to know what happened next. It was a valuable early lesson in the absolute supremacy of story.

My father told me about a perfect murder. When he was a young magistrate in an outstation town, a villager was brought before him. Muttuhami had fallen out with his neighbour over a breadfruit tree. The tree grew on Muttuhami's land, but some of its branches overhung the neighbour's property. Muttuhami had complained to the village headmanthat his neighbour was helping himself to the fruit that grew on these branches. The headman, who was related by marriage to the other man, sent Muttuhami away with a flea in his ear.

Shortly afterwards Muttuhami and his wife went to stay with her parents, who lived forty miles away. Two days later their neighbour, his wife and their three children were found dead in their hut. Autopsies showed the cause of the deaths to be strychnine poisoning. The family had ingested the poison with their evening meal of rice and lentils, and had died in agony. A clay cooking pot still contained a little lentil curry, which was analysed and proved to contain traces of rat poison.

The story of the dead man's quarrel with Muttuhami came out