O I do like to be beside the seaside

Though I was significantly less taken with the somewhat interminable road-trip there and back.

( Have some pictures of Bexhill seafront )

What is 'cosy' anyway?

Alas, Robert Barnard has died. While I have perhaps not liked his more recent works quite as much as some of the earlier ones, he was still a writer I looked out for.

I am, however, a little irked at the kneejerk categorisation of his work as 'firmly in the cosy school of crime writing'.

While quite a number of his mysteries are definitely in a lighter vein (e.g. Sheer Torture) a number of the others strike a darker note. As with other writers who are dismissed as 'cosy' because they do not go down mean streets gat in hand, fortified by the bourbon in the desk drawer, at the behest of a slinky yet somehow dodgy broad, he was capable of exposing the lethally toxic emotions and actions seething under the surface of normal and apparently respectable lives.