After the release today of interactive maps showing the levels of crime in each area of the country, you could be forgiven for thinking my Mistress was stretching her imagination a little too far by trying to set crime novels here in North Yorkshire. Fair enough, she’s using York rather than the surrounding areas for where some of it happens, but she has at least one murder happening in an area that comes out towards the bottom of the crime figures. Do you think this is something I should point out to her or is it adequate artistic licence that readers should use their imaginations to see things differently? I was thinking with Morse, at the beginning of setting so many murders in Oxford, there must have been people who thought that Colin Dexter was simply giving Oxford a bad name. I wonder how successful he had to become before the doubters shifted into the camp of seeing the good it brought to the town with visitors on the trail of Morse. All we need now is for my Mistress to become famous and people want to visit the places that her investigator lives. There’ll be people flocking to Haxby and asking where Connor Bankcroft lives, you just wait and see if there aren’t. I’m already asking to meet his sheepdog, Tammy. It seems only fair that a dog that my Mistress is writing about every day should be properly introduced to her real life dogs.
An alarming trend has been spotted by my Master. It appears that I have started to get a few grey hairs around my muzzle. I keep looking in the mirror and hoping that he’s made a mistake. I’m not even 4 until next month. At first I thought it might be off the chew I’d been chewing, but now it seems I was kidding myself. I asked my Mistress if it made me look distinguished and she reassured me that of course it did, but I think she was only being nice.